Bloomberg recently foretold the end of Germany’s days as an industrial power in an article that begins with a depiction of the closing of a factory in Dusseldorf. Stone-faced workers preside with funereal solemnity over the final act – the fashioning of a steel pipe at a rolling mill – at the century-old plant. The“flickering of flares and torches” and “somber tones of a lone horn player” lend the scene a decidedly medieval atmosphere.
Intentional or not in their inclusion of such evocative detail, the Bloomberg writers offer potent imagery for Germany – not only because the country is regressing economically but because its elites are increasingly guided by an atavistic force: the abandonment of reason.
As hard economic realities lay bare the futility of its utopian energy plan and the consequences of numerous terrible decisions mount, Germany is experiencing what Swedish essayist Malcom Kyeyune calls “narrative collapse.” The peculiar offspring of this, Kyeyune argues, is a turn toward ritual, superstition, and taboo. It is a malaise afflicting the entire West, but Germany is suffering a particularly acute case.
Kyeyune defines this as an occurrence “when social and political circumstances change too rapidly for people to keep up, the result tends to be collective manias, social panics, and pseudo-religious revivalist millenarianism.”
The abandonment of reason can be conceived of in various ways. Quite a lot of ink has already been spilled about the irrationality behind Germany’s fantastically improbable climate policy. Indeed, the quasi-religious verve with which this program has been rolled out speaks to something of a loosening of the country’s moorings. But as we will see shortly, the problem goes far beyond an attachment to unattainable policy goals.
Prominent German business executive Wolfgang Reitzle argued that for the government to deliver on its climate and energy policy, capacities for wind and solar power would have to be more than quadrupled, while storage and back-up capacities would have to be massively increased. Such a plan is “neither technically feasible nor affordable for a country like Germany,” Reitzle argues. What it is then, he concludes, “is simply insanity.”
Michael Shellenberger, in a piece for Forbes magazine in 2019, points out that the initial impetus for seeking to transition to renewables emerged from the idea that human civilization should be scaled back to sustainable levels. He cites German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1954 landmark essay ‘The Question Concerning of Technology’ and subsequent work by the likes of Barry Commoner and Murray Bookchin as espousing what emerged in the 1960s as a much more austere vision for the future of civilization.
Shellenberger concludes that the reason why “renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.”
The cohort who suddenly began thinking they could is the German political and intellectual elite in the early 2000s. Gone was the bucolic environmentalism of the 1960s and in its place came an aggressive and utterly detached-from-reality agenda that was imposed with millenarian fervor.
Before circling back to the idea put forth by Kyeyune – that the German elite is now mired in superstition due to the onset of narrative collapse – we must back up for a moment and examine what animated Germany prior to Bloomberg’s flickering flares and melancholy horn.
Modern Germany has long been an object of admiration for the West’s liberal elite, upheld as the ideal incarnation of the post-Fukuyama ‘history-has-ended’ world where liberal democracy triumphed and ideological conflict is a thing of the past. Germany, a nation with a penchant for militarism and authoritarianism, had expurgated its past sins and humbly assumed its place in the grand liberal order, magnanimously refusing to translate its economic prowess into bullying of others.
The country’s status was enhanced even further when the US and UK went off the rails, as the elite saw it, with the populist rebellions of Donald Trump and Brexit. Germany, with its staid, consensus-driven, common-sense politics, was the ‘adult in the room’, in stark contrast to the Anglosphere.
Meanwhile, its economy was humming. The hyper-globalization of the 2000s played right into Germany’s hands. It was a confluence of propitious global circumstances. China was growing at astronomical rates and needed cars and machines – Germany provided both. The expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe opened up new markets for German exports. Germany was prospering and its success was an important driver of economic development across Europe.
All of this helped foster what was perhaps the primary trait of the German elite during this time: a supreme confidence. It was this confidence that led Angela Merkel to famously assert “wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”) when confronted with the task of assimilating over a million migrants. It was the same confidence that led to the idea of jettisoning both nuclear power and coal at essentially the same time, an announcement that was met with a certain disbelief but also awe. “If anyone can do it, it’s the Germans,” was a commonly heard response.
However, the last few years have witnessed a shaking of that assuredness and unraveling of the prevailing narratives as Germany’s vaunted stability and prosperity have been challenged and the benevolent globalized world that nurtured it began fading. But narrative collapse, like many other forms of collapse, at first happens slowly and at the margins before being catapulted forward by some trigger into its more rapid terminal phase.
What was happening at the margins was that the economic model that sustained Germany over the past two decades came under increasing strain as China moved up the value chain and began importing less of Germany’s manufacturing output; it had also become a competitor in the automobile market. Meanwhile, Germany’s economy largely failed to diversify and has been slow to embrace innovation.
Likewise, doubts about the prospects for the energy transition had begun creeping in, again at the margins, long before the events of 2022. Germany has made little progress toward its 2030 emissions target, and it is laughably far behind in its aim of putting 15 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030. It has had to delay plans for the phase-out of coal, and in fact even as of 2021 coal still accounted for a quarter of electricity output. In other words, rather than effecting an actual transition, Germany had merely set up a clean energy system that ran parallel to the dirty one. The clean one spoke to the narrative while the dirty one still powered much of the country. This could not help but plant the seed of the cognitive dissonance that would later assume such bewildering proportions.
Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly the start of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022 that has precipitated the cascade of failure we see now. Certainly, Germany has made many poor decisions during this time, not the least of which was its headlong plunge into supporting the US-led proxy war against Russia. Relatedly, watching Russia’s sanctions-ridden economy rebound and return to growth – while their own economy struggled – defied everything the German elites would have imagined. That in itself is a narrative-shaking development.
But perhaps more important than the particular economic and political setbacks has been a sense that the benevolent, familiar world of recent decades is receding ever faster and in its place is coming something ominous, as if from a strange and turbulent dream.
To quote Kyeyune again, it’s as if “the future that they were promised – and that they promised the rest of us – was one of continued Western progress, prosperity, and geopolitical dominance. But that’s looking less and less plausible, and they neither like nor understand the future that is coming into view.”
For the elites, the world is crumbling around them and nothing is playing out as they had desired, which has deeply shaken their confidence.
The quotes from public officials and business leaders offered in the Bloomberg piece are bleak and a far cry from the “wir schaffen das” confidence of a few years back.
Stefan Klebert, the CEO of a company that has been supplying manufacturing machinery since the late 19th century, said: “To be honest, there is not much hope. I’m not really sure if we can stop this trend. Many things have to change quickly.”
Finance Minister Christian Lindner told a Bloomberg event earlier in February: “We are no longer competitive. We are getting poorer and poorer because we are not growing. We are falling behind.”
Volker Treier, foreign trade chief at Germany’s Chambers of Commerce and Industry, remarked: “You don’t have to be a pessimist to say that what we’re doing at the moment won’t be enough. The speed of structural change is dizzying.”
The last quote, a lament about the speed of structural change, is particularly telling and makes us recall Kyeyune’s assertion that when social and political circumstances change too rapidly for people to keep up, strange flora can sprout.
This sense of no longer being able to control events and the fear this has engendered have bred a sense of impotence among the European elites – a sort of ‘deer frozen in the headlights’ paralysis – with Germany at the vanguard of this. No longer confident that their actions can produce certain desirable outcomes, the elites have shed their sophisticated modern veneer and technocratic sensibility and retreated into symbolism and superstition.
In a way this should come as no surprise. It is an age-old human response to the lack of control – think about rain dances instead of irrigation – that once again confirms the words of George Bernard Shaw that “the period of time covered by history is far too short to allow of any perceptible progress in the popular sense of evolution of the human species. The notion that there has been any such progress since Caesar’s time is too absurd for discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of which we have any record as existing in the past, exists at the present moment.”
As a result of this, actions, emptied of their utilitarian contents, come to be seen as inherently meaningful only if they conform to the prevailing superstitions and carry the necessary symbolism. The policies being pursued are thus detached from reason in the sense that they are no longer evaluated or even undertaken with an expectation of a particular outcome – in fact, the outcomes are often quite the opposite of the presumed intention, leading to all manner of absurdities.
The EU’s rush to approve an absolutely token package of sanctions by February 24 – the anniversary of the beginning of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine – is not being carried out with the slightest expectation that a motley assortment of obscure companies and third-tier public officials coming under EU sanctions will achieve any policy aims. The entire value of the endeavor is in its symbolism. Because the symbolism is ‘correct’ the action becomes important.
Germany’s Green Party, a leading voice both in the fanatical climate program and the anti-Russia camp, has in the last two years promoted policies that have directly led to an increase in the burning of coal in the country. This is certainly not an outcome the party would have ever lobbied for. But its actions no longer have anything to do with specific desired outcomes; rather they exist entirely in the mist-filled world of symbolism and, in the logic of this new age of superstition, are to be evaluated only in relation to their symbolic potency.
Kyeyune gives what may be the most vivid example of this principle at work. “Germany still has one functioning pipeline through the Baltic Sea but refuses to use it,” he correctly notes, referring to one line of Nord Stream 2 that was not damaged in the sabotage attack carried out in September 2022. “The problem is that the alternative approach to meeting its energy needs means buying liquefied natural gas… and some of this gas comes from Russia. In other words, Germany still buys natural gas from Russia, less efficiently and at a higher cost, in order to maintain a quasi-ritualistic prohibition against use of the pipeline.”
Meanwhile, he continues, a similar operation takes place with Russian oil, which is now sent to India or China to be refined before being imported by Europe. It is “as if the act of mixing it with other oil in a foreign refinery removes the evil spirits contained in it.” In other words, Russian oil must undergo some sort of purification process before it can enter the EU garden. European refiners, meanwhile, suffer, while all sorts of middlemen are enriched along the way, and consumers are left paying higher prices. There is not an ounce of economic logic to it – but we have now passed into a realm beyond economic logic.
Policies governing energy, the lifeblood of industrial civilization, are now subject to the tyranny of ritual, taboo, and superstition. Such is the predicament of the German elite as it seeks to navigate the country through a turbulent period of epochal transition. The abandonment of reason is quite a handicap in carrying out that job.
The drug-induced nipple secretions of trans women are as good as mothers’ breast milk for babies, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust claimed in a letter to campaigners made public in a report by British think tank the Policy Exchange on Sunday.
The healthcare trust’s medical director, Rachel James, argued that the off-label prescription drug cocktail men transitioning to female take in order to produce milk was “similar to the natural hormones which encourage lactation to develop when the baby is newly born.”
“The evidence which is available demonstrates that the milk is comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby,” James wrote in the letter, sent to Children of Transitioners last August.
Biological men who wish to lactate must first take hormones to grow milk glands and then take high doses of either domperidone or metoclopramide to stimulate milk production. Neither drug is approved for this use, though they are occasionally prescribed off-label to biological women who have trouble lactating.
However, domperidone’s own manufacturer, Janssen, warns patients the drug “may cause unwanted side effects affecting the heart in a breastfed baby” and “should be used during breastfeeding only if your physician considers this clearly necessary.”
USHT doubled down on its claims that chest “milk” was just as good as breast milk on Sunday. “We stand by the facts of the letter and the cited evidence supporting them,” it said in a statement.
That evidence reportedly included a handful of decades-old articles comparing milk produced by induced lactation with postpartum mother’s milk – apparently not distinguishing between milk produced by biological women and that produced by biological men – and the World Health Organization’s recommendation of breastmilk (which the trust called “human milk”) over infant formula.
The trust also cited a 2022 study that found there were “no observable infant side effects” in the babies of lactating trans women. However, critics pointed out that the study lasted just five months and included no long-term follow-up. Most writings on the subject “have not looked at what’s in the milk itself,” one medical expert told the Daily Mail.
The group admitted its policy was based on advice from “external organizations,” though it did not name them. USHT was reportedly the first UK health trust to adopt the term “birthing people” as part of its inclusivity efforts.
Denouncing the NHS trust’s claims as “unbalanced and naive,” Policy Exchange Head of Equality and Identity Lottie Moore slammed the organization for “compromising women’s rights and child safeguarding” by encouraging unsafe practices.
“A child’s welfare must always take precedence over identity politics and contested belief systems that are not evidence-based,” she told the Mail.
There is a concerted effort to drive a growing number of individuals, particularly the younger demographic, toward mental health screenings and interventions.
Schools across the United States are implementing mental health programs to tackle the ongoing mental health crisis. The underlying concept is well-intentioned, drawing parallels between mental health prevention and physical health education. This entails raising awareness of behaviors promoting mental well-being and encouraging active engagement in such behaviors.
However, what if the notion of “prioritizing mental health” is inadvertently causing harm? In a New York Times opinion essay titled “This is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers,” Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Southern California, argued that certain programs aimed at addressing mental health issues in young people not only fell short in providing help but actually exacerbated their problems.
Enter WISE Teens, a school program focused on “social-emotional skills training,” spearheaded by clinical psychologists in training. This innovative initiative comprises eight weekly hour-long classroom sessions designed to equip students with tools and principles derived from both cognitive behavior therapy and Zen Buddhism. The goal? To empower students in managing their emotions effectively.
In a recent study published in the journal Behavior Research and Therapy (read here), researchers examined the experiences of 1,071 Australian teenagers over the span of 2017 to 2018. The participants were divided into two groups: one engaged in the WISE Teens program, while the other followed a standard health-class curriculum. Surprisingly, the findings revealed that compared to those receiving standard education, students in WISE Teens reported higher levels of depression, increased anxiety, greater difficulty managing their emotions, and strained relationships with their parents. Astonishingly, one out of every eight participants in WISE Teens showed signs of clinical depression post-program, as opposed to one out of every 13 participants in the regular health classes.
This was an educational program and NOT Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), despite some academic enthusiasts wrongly claiming that DBT for Adolescents is ineffective. DBT for Adolescents is a comprehensive psychotherapy involving specialized individual therapy, skills coaching for both parents and children, and coaching consultations. It’s specifically designed to help teenagers facing severe emotion dysregulation, including issues like suicidality and self-injury. What we’re discussing here, however, is not that. It’s an attempt to build skills in a non-clinical population.
The question arises: should our school personnel be getting involved in mental health matters? How about pediatricians and primary care doctors? Could this be contributing to the problem rather than solving it?
The irony is hard to ignore: school decisions made during the pandemic played a direct role in the rise of mental health issues among children. It’s widely known that kids flourish through social interaction, in-person learning, and engaging activities that aid their development. Yet, what actually unfolded was the opposite – they were pulled out of schools, exposed to prolonged screen time, and had their extracurriculars taken away. Not surprisingly, the increase in screen time and social media usage went hand in hand with a decline in mental health. Indeed, there’s a paradox in expecting the same authorities to screen, oversee, and intervene in mental health problems. So what happens when these concepts are taught to impressionable kids?
Psychiatric Ideology is Harmful
When kids are doing well, they’re focused outward – active, engaged, and fully living life. But turning that focus inward and exposing them to psychiatric labels and ideas? That’s just plain foolish. Kids are at a stage where they’re figuring out who they are, and throwing around these labels is confusing. It’s risky business, especially when these labels start defining their inner world and capabilities.
When introducing concepts around mental health problems kids are prone to speaking about normal life struggles in terms of symptoms and diagnoses. This approach instills a sense of pathology or abnormality in children’s everyday struggles, potentially leading to heightened anxiety or self-stigmatization.
The psychiatric industry suggests that DSM diagnoses are legitimate disease constructs, akin to physical illnesses. However, they’re merely crude labels slapped onto a spectrum of emotional and behavioral manifestations. Major Depressive Disorder isn’t a tangible ailment like strep throat or a tumor. ADHD isn’t an innate disease. These labels lack explanatory value.
One’s struggle with depression may stem from valid reasons such as life setbacks, loss, loneliness, financial woes, or other health issues – not because you have Major Depressive Disorder. Kids often miss this nuance, making them susceptible to labeling themselves: “I can’t do this due to my anxiety,” or “My ADHD is hindering my homework.” Such labels, instead of clarifying, can breed a sense of hopelessness about the future.
Chemical Imbalance Lies have Harmed Generations
During the 1990s and 2000s, the pharmaceutical industry teamed up with academic psychiatry to brand mental health conditions as brain disorders. The government poured billions into hunting for some biological or genetic root, presenting psychiatry with the chance to solidify its standing as legitimate doctors. By attributing depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other “mood disorders” to a biological origin, they could conveniently fit them into the allopathic model—essentially, the solution became prescribing a drug. This alliance shaped not just the narrative around mental health but also the lucrative industry that emerged from it.
“I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.” – Thomas Insel, MD
Despite the lack of an identified biological basis for these conditions, the pharmaceutical industry and academic psychiatry propagated the myth of chemical imbalances, resulting in the emergence of a multi-billion dollar psychiatric drug industry. During this period, psychiatric diagnoses skyrocketed, with near 25% adults relying on at least one psychiatric drug. Astonishingly, all available statistics point to a deterioration in mental health. This should come as no surprise. When individuals are taught that their emotions are beyond their control and framed as symptoms of a physical illness, they are effectively conditioned to seek relief through medication rather than understanding their emotions in context and leveraging them to confront challenges and solve problems.
It’s important to notice that many teachers and school staff are exposed to the same ideologies that contribute to the issues affecting our culture. Schools can become breeding grounds for the perpetuation of concepts like chemical imbalances, victimization culture, and other fringe ideologies. The cycle continues as those who have been influenced by these ideas become the educators, passing on harmful ideas.
Public Schools are a Breeding Ground for Indoctrination
Teachers, school counselors, administrators, and school psychologists often lack the comprehensive knowledge, training, and expertise required to navigate the complexities of emotional and behavioral issues. Their roles were not originally designed to involve the identification or intervention of emotional problems, nor should they be.
Regrettably, public schools have become battlegrounds for fringe ideologies and cultural Marxism, transforming the educational system into an extension of an expanding nanny state that encroaches on the individual rights of families.
Initiatives such as social and emotional learning, gender ideology, and mental health screening have positioned school personnel as gatekeepers for broader societal movements. Non-experts in the field may incorrectly inform parents that their children have conditions like “ADHD” and discuss fringe ideas without scientific legitimacy, significantly influencing how parents perceive their children’s development.
In this climate, normal developmental challenges are pathologized within a culture fueled by fear. Teachers, conditioned to identify early signs of potential academic or emotional issues, become hyper-vigilant to any cues that might suggest a child is at risk of becoming a school shooter, facing suicide, or dropping out of high school.
Tragically, educators have been misled into thinking they can pinpoint these so-called “disorders,” often oversimplifying complex issues and resorting to problematic “early interventions”, at times pushing drugs. This unintended consequence creates a system where educators feel compelled to categorize and refer for medication. Paradoxically, assigning labels to children and administering mind & mood-altering drugs significantly heighten the risk of the very feared consequences they sought to prevent.
Don’t Accept “Depression Screening” Measures
Mental Health Screening* is based on the subjective and unscientific diagnostic system developed by mental health professionals, many with financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has brazenly recommended an audacious strategy: subjecting adolescents aged 12 years and older to annual screenings for depression, using formal self-report tools on paper or electronically. These guidelines, undoubtedly, serve one sinister purpose: to inflate the number of children diagnosed with depression. It is a well-known fact that screening measures are notorious for producing false positives. This means that a substantial percentage of individuals identified through these screenings do not actually suffer from the supposed problem being screened.
According to psychologist Chuck Ruby, as stated in his book “Smoke and Mirrors,” with approximately 74 million children under the age of 18 residing in the United States, subjecting them all to an 80% accurate screening tool would result in millions being falsely labeled. These guidelines not only perpetuate a dangerous cycle of overdiagnosis but also push countless innocent young individuals into unnecessary treatment-psychiatric drugs.
Dr. David Shaffer of Columbia University, the psychiatrist who invented one screening program, “TeenScreen,” admits it has a potential 84 percent chance of wrongly identifying teens to be at risk of suicide. He has long-term ties to drug companies and is a consultant for Hoffman La Roche, Wyeth and GlaxoSmithKline.
The ease with which normal developmental behaviors can be misdiagnosed as symptoms of clinical depression is a concerning issue. The primary screening measure utilized for assessing adolescent depression is the PHQ-9 for Adolescents, a self-report questionnaire comprising of nine questions that focus on supposed “depressive symptoms”. What is particularly noteworthy is the origin of this questionnaire—it was developed by none other than… Pfizer!
This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to a particular psychiatric disorder; it’s a pervasive issue across various mental health conditions. A widely recognized pharmaceutical marketing strategy involves expanding the diagnostic criteria for a disorder, essentially broadening the definition to encompass aspects within the spectrum of normal human experiences. By doing so, the pharmaceutical industry can effectively create a market for their products, as more individuals are diagnosed and deemed potential consumers.
Reclaiming our Communities
The key to effective mental health prevention lies in common sense. It begins with cultivating a nurturing and loving home environment that prioritizes the well-being of children. Provide structure and a sense of predictability. Reduce screen time, provide nutrient-dense meals, avoid processed and chemically laden junk, ensure adequate sleep, and embrace community and faith-based traditions. Throw in some exercise, extra-curricular activities, and social gatherings for good measure. While emphasizing the importance of academic achievement, fostering a love for learning, discipline, and resilience, it may be opportune to empower our school teachers to thrive in their specialties—math, science, English, and history—leaving the framework for mental well-being in the capable hands of families and those they trust.
*In a previous post I wrote about the dangers of screening measures in pediatrics and primary care (Read here)
The last couple of years have been hell for the SSRI hustle.
First, in 2022, landmark research shot a God-sized hole in the “low serotonin causes depression” biochemical voodoo narrative, previously accepted uncritically as Gospel and which has sustained the multi-billion-dollar SSRI racket for decades.
“Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without, and methods to reduce serotonin availability using tryptophan depletion do not consistently lower mood in volunteers. High quality, well-powered genetic studies effectively exclude an association between genotypes related to the serotonin system and depression, including a proposed interaction with stress. Weak evidence from some studies of serotonin 5-HT1A receptors and levels of SERT points towards a possible association between increased serotonin activity and depression. However, these results are likely to be influenced by prior use of antidepressants and its effects on the serotonin system. The effects of tryptophan depletion in some cross-over studies involving people with depression may also be mediated by antidepressants, although these are not consistently found.”
Bet you didn’t see that report on Fox News or MSNBC!
Unvarnished veritas: the reason you tune into independent media like Armageddon Prose.
Legacy media producers/executives/news actors know how their bread gets buttered, and it’s not by informing their audience; it’s by selling (patented) erectile dysfunction and depression drugs wall-to-wall on every commercial break and keeping their mouths shut about the industry’s lies and abuses in between said commercial breaks.
Now, in research published late last year, we learn that psychotherapy alone not only beats antidepressants alone for combatting depression, but that it beats the combination of both!
In other words, antidepressants are worse than useless for treating depression in tandem with psychotherapy.
“The results showed that antidepressant exposure significantly increased the risk of suicide and suicide attempt when compared with no antidepressant usage among children and adolescents…
Among the antidepressants, SSRI use was associated with an increased risk of suicide and suicide attempt…
Clinicians should evaluate carefully their patients and be cautious with patients at risk to have treatment emergence or worsening of suicidal ideation (TESI/TWOSI) when prescribing antidepressants to children and young patients.
Thirty-four relevant RCTs were included. Psychotherapy-only was stronger than combined treatment (1.9% v. 3.7%; OR 1.96 [1.20–3.20], p = 0.012) and ADM-only (3.0% v. 5.6%; OR 0.45 [0.30–0.67], p = 0.001) in decreasing the likelihood of [severe adverse events] in the primary and trim-and-fill sensitivity analyses. Combined treatment was better than ADM-only in reducing the probability of SAEs (6.0% v. 8.7%; OR 0.74 [0.56–0.96], p = 0.029), but this comparative efficacy finding was non-significant in the sensitivity analyses. Subgroup analyses revealed the advantage of psychotherapy-only over combined treatment and ADM-only for reducing SAE risk among children and adolescents and the benefit of combined treatment over ADM-only among adults. Overall, psychotherapy and combined treatment outperformed ADM-only in reducing the likelihood of SAEs, perhaps by conferring strategies to enhance reasons for living. Plausibly, psychotherapy should be prioritized for high-risk youths and combined treatment for high-risk adults with MDD.”
As Pfizer exhorted the peasants at this year’s Super Bowl commercial pageantry, “Here’s to Science™”! (Except when it runs counter to financial interests; then it gets defunded and shelved and its practitioners run out of the field and any professional licenses confiscated by the state.)
The WEF-captured government of France has pushed through a draconian new law entitled Article 4. This Orwellian and unconstitutional color of law power grab is a purposely poor attempt at obscuring the irrefutable slow kill bioweapon death and destruction data.
What makes Article 4 particularly incendiary is that the majority of the French population has been outright refusing all “vaccinations.” Throttling their free speech as it pertains to gene modifying poisons will only increase the already heightened tensions between the criminal Macron administration and the awakening French populace, by design.
Between WEF puppet Trudeau in Canada and WEF puppet Macron in France, there is now a race to create the most totalitarian technocommunist nation in the West, with France now taking a slight lead; to wit:
These policies and “laws” are nothing more than an extension of the ongoing democide, and the associated iatrocide.
Meanwhile, back in the USSA, the Center for Disease Crimes (CDC) is still at it with their “Trust the Science” mendacity and murder:
Readers of this Substack fully appreciate the myocarditis and turbo cancer epidemics currently underway — not to mention soaring excess non-PSYOP-19 mortality — since the rollout of the “vaccines:”
Removing all BigPharma legal liabilities and prosecuting the various “health” agencies like the FDA, CDC, NIH, et al. has never been more urgent.
France’s Article 4 is just a hint at what is to come, especially if the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty scam ever passes in the various nations that they are attempting to further hijack.
The world of international public health is in a precarious position. Current policy, resources, personal careers, and the very credibility of major organizations are aligned with the recent statement from the World Health Organization (WHO) that:
Epidemics and pandemics of infectious diseases are occurring more often, and spreading faster and further than ever, in many different regions of the world.
Focus has shifted from the highest burden diseases, and the community-based empowerment required to tackle them, to preventing, identifying, and mitigating diseases that are rare and/or of relatively low burden, or even hypothetical. Namely, a new focus on sudden outbreaks of infectious disease or, in their more spectacular rendering, ‘pandemics.’
The challenge with this approach is that a thorough review of the evidence base underpinning the WHO’s agenda, and that of partners including the World Bank and G20, demonstrates that the above statement is inconsistent with available data. The largest database on which these agencies rely, the GIDEON database, actually shows quite a contrary trajectory. The burden of outbreaks, and therefore risk, is shown to be reducing. By implication, the largest investments in the history of international public health appear to be based on misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misrepresentation of key evidence.
Weighing Truth and Opportunity
Public health policy must always address threats in context. Every intervention involves a trade-off in terms of financial, social, and clinical risk. The WHO defines health in terms of physical, mental, and social well-being, and an intervention in one of these areas can impact all three. This is why public health agencies must consider all aspects of direct cost, opportunity cost, and risk when formulating policy. It is why communities and individuals must have adequate information to make decisions in their own cultural, social, and ecological context.
To make sure policy assumptions and evidence is sufficient, it is therefore imperative to include broad information from multiple sources. Reliance on epithets, dogma, deplatforming, and censorship are therefore intrinsically dangerous. This is all, of course, meant to be coded into the normative principles of decolonization, human rights, and equity on which the WHO’s constitution is based.
So, back to the precarious position in which the WHO and the international public health community find themselves. They have staked their reputation and political standing on being the center of a centralized approach to save the global populace from urgent, impending, and recurrent emergencies; an existential threat to humanity as the G20 tells us. An objective analysis reveals that these emergencies are rarely likely to reach a level that justifies the diversion of serious resources from endemic and chronic diseases that do actually maim and kill at scale (see chart below).
Admitting such a reality, after touting the inevitability of disaster so loudly, would risk career prospects, derision, and diminished ability to monetize the post-Covid moment. Yet, to ignore wider considerations in global public health and the evidence that informs those considerations would require abandonment of basic principles and ethics. A dilemma that calls for honesty, introspection, and strength.
Major causes of death by disease globally, in 2019. Global Burden of Disease data, presented at https://ourworldindata.org/.
What the Data Actually Shows
REPPARE’s analysis of the evidence behind the WHO, World Bank, and G20 documents promoting the pandemic preparedness agenda show that recorded outbreaks, both arising within human populations and as ‘spillover’ of pathogens from animals, have increased in the decades before the year 2000, with burden now declining (graphic below).
However, it is inevitable that reporting of such outbreaks will be influenced by changes in both the capacity and incentive to report. These include the development of, and increasing access to, major diagnostic platforms including PCR and point-of-care antigen and serology tests, as well as improvements in communication infrastructure. Fifty years ago, many pathogens now readily identifiable could simply not be detected, or the diseases they cause be distinguished from clinically similar conditions. It is remarkable that this would be overlooked or downplayed by major health agencies, but this is, unexpectedly, the case.
Extract from Fig. 2 of Morand and Walther (2020-23), showing marked recent reductions in outbreak and disease numbers in GIDEON database.
The development of improved diagnostic technologies not only impacts reporting rates but has obvious implications for understanding the term ‘emerging infectious disease’ (EID). This frequently used term suggests that new threats are constantly emerging, such as the Nipah virus outbreaks of the past 25 years. However, while some pathogens have newly entered human populations, such as new influenza variants, HIV and the SARS-1 virus, others such as Nipah virus were simply not detectable without recent technological advances as they cause non-specific illnesses. We are now better at finding them, which puts us immediately in a better, safer position.
Crucially, actual mortality from these acute outbreaks has remained low for a century in contrast to other current health burdens. The much-quoted analysis of Bernstein et al. (2022) suggesting millions of outbreak deaths per year includes pre-antibiotic era Spanish flu and the multi-decade HIV event, averaging it across today’s population size.
However, as their own dataset shows, nothing like the Spanish flu has occurred in terms of mortality in the past century. As most Spanish flu deaths were due to secondary infection, and we now have modern antibiotics, it also provides a poor model for future outbreaks. With HIV and influenza excluded, pre-Covid acute outbreak mortality underlying current pandemicmessaging is under 30 thousand people, globally, over the past couple of decades. Tuberculosis alone kills over 3,500 per day.
Covid-19 has, of course, intervened. It fits with difficulty into the main pandemic narrative for a number of reasons. First, its origin remains controversial, but appears likely to involve non-natural influences. While laboratory escapes can and (inevitably) will occur, the surveillance and response being proposed here is targeted at outbreaks of natural origin. Second, Covid-19 mortality occurred mainly in the elderly with significant comorbidities, meaning actual impact on overall life expectancy was far less than the raw reported mortality figures suggest (this also complicates attribution). If considered of natural origin, it appears as an outlier rather than part of a trend in the datasets on which the WHO, the World Bank, and G20 rely.
Time to Pause, Think, and Employ Common Sense
The evidence, assessed objectively, paints a picture of an increasing ability to identify and report outbreaks up to the decade 2000 to 2010 (which explains increases in frequency), followed by a reduction in burden consistent with an increasing ability to successfully address these relatively low-burden events through current public health mechanisms (which explains a lowering trajectory in mortality). This fits well with what one would intuitively expect. Namely, modern technologies and improving health systems, medicines, and economies have improved pathogen detection and reduced illness. There is much to suggest that this trend will continue.
In this context, the analyses of the WHO, the World Bank, and the G20 are disappointing in terms of scholarship and balance. A critic could reasonably suggest that a desire to address a perceived threat is driving a particularly gloomy analysis, rather than analysis objectively aiming to determine the extent of the threat. Such an approach seems unlikely to address the needs of public health.
To be clear, disease outbreaks harm people and shorten lives and must be addressed. And there are of course improvements that should and could be made to address this risk appropriately. In common with most aspects of medicine and science, this is best achieved on the basis of well-compiled evidence and scholarly analysis rather than allowing predetermined assumptions to drive outcomes.
By making claims contrary to the data, international health agencies are misleading governments of Member States down an unevidenced path with correspondingly high estimated cost and diverted political capital. This currently stands at $31.1 billion annually not including One Health measures and surge funding and at least 5 new global instruments; or about 10 times the WHO’s current annual budget. The urgency involved in the pandemic preparedness agenda is either contrary to evidence or poorly supported by it.
In view of their influence, international health agencies have a particular responsibility to ensure their policies are well-grounded in data and objective analysis. Moreover, governments have a responsibility to take the time, and effort, to ensure that their populations are well-served. It is hoped that the evaluation in the REPPARE report Rational Policy Over Panic will contribute to this effort.
REPPARE
REPPARE (REevaluating the Pandemic Preparedness And REsponse agenda) involves a multidisciplinary team convened by the University of Leeds, and led by two principal investigators.
Garrett W. Brown
Garrett Wallace Brown is Chair of Global Health Policy at the University of Leeds. He is Co-Lead of the Global Health Research Unit and will be the Director of a new WHO Collaboration Centre for Health Systems and Health Security. His research focuses on global health governance, health financing, health system strengthening, health equity, and estimating the costs and funding feasibility of pandemic preparedness and response. He has conducted policy and research collaborations in global health for over 25 years and has worked with NGOs, governments in Africa, the DHSC, the FCDO, the UK Cabinet Office, WHO, G7, and G20.
David Bell
David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modeling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, and worked on infectious diseases and coordinated malaria diagnostics strategy at the World Health Organization. He has worked for 20 years in biotech and international public health, with over 120 research publications. David is based in Texas, USA.
Of all rackets, the so-called “renewable energy” racket may be the most fraudulent and nonsensical. What geologists call the “Last Glacial Period” occurred between c. 115,000 – c. 11,700 years ago. Pretty much ALL human development has occurred since the glaciers retreated. During the last Ice Age, glaciers advanced as far south as what is now the state of Missouri. They retreated at a time when human population is estimated to have numbered around 4 million.
The following chart is a visual representation of successive cooling and warming trends and the associated advance and retreat of glaciers.
The so-called greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone—comprise 0.04 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. Even scientists who pay lip service to the human induced global warming theory acknowledge that for most of the last 66 million years, CO2 levels in the earth’s atmosphere were much higher than they are today.
In the 1970s, climatologists were concerned that modern man would soon experience another cooling trend, resulting in yet another glacial advance that would bulldoze the cities of Canada and much of the United States. In the eighties, the theory of global warming—induced by human greenhouse gas emissions—became fashionable. What really ignited this intellectual, social, and political trend was the discovery that billions of public funds could be funneled into “renewable energy” industries through the mechanism of subsidies and tax credits.
This morning I stumbled across a notable investigative report titled Secret Partnership Fueling Climate Hawk Journalism. Note that many of the foundations that are key players in the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex are also key players in the Climate-Industrial Complex.
Cracks are forming in the World Health Organisation’s plans to secure a vast expansion of its powers and resources. Presented as a necessarily urgent response to the empirically unsupported assertion that pandemics are increasing in frequency and severity, negotiations for a broad package of amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) and a new parallel Pandemic Treaty had been expected to be over by the end of 2023. Having missed that deadline, in late January the Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pleaded for WHO member states to give ground so that the negotiations could be completed at all. In the same comments he sought to apportion blame for the unexpected headwinds on those who had misconstrued, or misrepresented, the benign intentions of the WHO and its key supporters (which include China and some wealthy private organisations).
Reading between the lines, it appears that Mr. Ghebreyesus and his supporters may finally have realised that the game could soon be up: the strength of opposition to the ambitions of this unelected technocratic administration has compounded rapidly in recent weeks. That opposition has become more evident not only in smaller less influential countries, but in countries which are major contributors to the WHO. Significantly this has included groups of politicians in the U.K. and the U.S. who are seriously alarmed by the vision of a WHO-centred ‘command and control’ public health system, and by the constitutional and public spending implications of these two proposed international agreements.
The Director-General has perhaps realised that his blind ambition has not only put at risk the negotiations that might have elevated his unelected advisory organisation to the status of a supra-national rule-making authority, but is also now starting to jeopardise the future status, funding and membership of the WHO.
Secrecy, opacity and delay
The original timeline presented by the WHO had envisaged a final text of the proposed IHR amendments – where many of the most contentious proposals reside – being published before January 27th 2024, with a view to their adoption taking place at the World Health Assembly meeting scheduled from May 27th to June 1st 2024, alongside adoption of the proposed new Pandemic Treaty. That timeline, although tight, would have allowed four months for negotiators to brief domestic stakeholders, for national legislatures to debate the combined proposals and for any necessary pre-adoption formalities (approvals, technical scrutiny, cost/benefit analyses, etc.) to be completed prior to a vote at the WHA meeting in May.
Yet, on its own initiative, in October 2023 the Working Group for the negotiation of the IHR amendments unilaterally moved its own goalposts so that in place of publishing a final draft text to be scrutinised well in advance of that WHA meeting, it instead committed to circulate by the end of January a copy of the original set of proposed amendments and an interim ‘working draft’ text showing the current state of play. Negotiations would then continue between February and April 2024. It was – and remains – ambiguous whether this move was compatible with the procedural legal requirements already enshrined in the International Health Regulations, but perhaps member states quietly agreed with the WHO secretariat not to look too hard at that issue.
Notwithstanding this commitment, no interim working draft of the IHR amendments appears yet to have been published, and the U.K. officials involved in the negotiations have been inexplicably reluctant to reveal the current position of the text. Indeed, to date all demands for transparency by U.K. parliamentarians have been ignored or deflected by the ministers responsible for the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO. Astonishingly the U.K. Government has refused even to confirm who is negotiating on the U.K.’s behalf.
We understand that the IHR Working Group anticipates a final text being settled only during April or possibly even into May, but there remains no official deadline for it to publish that final text. It refuses to confirm what the documents say, and it refuses to say when it will reveal those documents. If any further evidence were needed of the disregard and disrespect for democratic process and the sovereignty of national parliaments now alleged of the WHO, then surely this is it.
Out of time
That corrosive secrecy, opacity and delay has left a vanishingly narrow window for domestic public health organisations and parliamentarians to review or comment meaningfully on what may become generationally-significant changes to the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO, with other countries and with the public health business community. It means Parliament will have scant opportunity to scrutinise the IHR amendments and the new international funding and resource-sharing commitments enshrined in the parallel Pandemic Treaty. Yet these are documents with the potential to impact materially on the U.K.’s ability to act autonomously, on freedom of speech and opinion, on health security and on the nature of U.K. democracy itself. They also have the potential to commit future generations to very significant public spending obligations.
Given their significance, the IHR proposals and the parallel Pandemic Treaty require a commensurate degree of examination by Parliament. The current nature of the WHO’s funding, 85% of which now comes from private commercially-interested organisations, creates an additional imperative for rigorous, investigative scrutiny. In November 2023, Human Rights Watch wrote that:
The draft [treaty] reflects a process disproportionately guided by corporate demands and the policy positions of high-income governments seeking to protect the power of private actors in health including the pharmaceutical industry.
Without sight of any working drafts of the revised IHRs, nor of the current state of the draft treaty, scrutiny is completely frustrated. At this late stage in the process, after repetitive calls for transparency seemingly have been ignored, one is left to wonder whether this is precisely the intent of the officials involved.
Deferral is the rational solution
As the window for full, fair, candid appraisal by national democratically-elected legislatures is now all but shut, the logical and necessary solution is for member states to demand that any vote to adopt either of these two international accords is held over to the next WHA meeting in May 2025. This will allow ample time both for the conclusion of the negotiations and for member state-level scrutiny of the proposals served up by the negotiating teams.
If it is truly the case that the WHO and its member officials do not intend for national legislatures to cede rule-making sovereignty to an enlarged WHO technocracy, they will surely accept the need for state-level legislatures to control the timing of this process. Calls for deferral have begun, but more voices will be needed to press relevant political leaders and officials to accept that deferral is the only legitimate response to this situation.
A turning point
Even now, in the face of a chorus of rational legally-grounded concerns raised by U.K. parliamentarians about the substance of the proposed amendments and the opacity of the negotiations, the Government has remained steadfastly unwilling to comment on its negotiating intent and objectives, beyond vague platitudes. Efforts by members of the public, legal experts and parliamentarians to understand the current state of negotiations, and even just the arrangements within the U.K. Government to conduct the negotiations, have been stonewalled. The WHO equally has remained virtually mute and offered no meaningful evidence to support claims that its ambitions have been misunderstood.
This has served only to fuel distrust in this process, in the Government and its senior officials, in the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO, and in the WHO’s relationship with its influential funding providers.
Behaviour of this overtly undemocratic nature indicates that the WHO project has long since lost sight of its noble foundations in post-war benevolent multilateralism, and indeed of its reason for being: health for all in pursuit of global peace and security. Unfortunately, the WHO is now a symbol of all that is wrong with what has become a system of global public health patronage. This shamelessly undemocratic and chaotic power grab is also indicative of an organisation which has reached the end of its useful life, at least in its current guise. We suggest that this sorry episode should become the impetus for the U.K. to revisit its relationship with the WHO, and the relationship of the WHO with its funding providers.
The U.K. will not be an outlier if it does so, but rather a role model and – judging by the breadth and strength of international expressions of antipathy for the WHO’s ambitions – a leader of fast followers. This may well be the U.K.’s best post-Brexit opportunity to be an actor of global significance on the international stage.
Molly Kingsley is a founder and Ben Kingsley is the Head of Legal Affairs at children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Find UsForThem on Substack. Ben and Molly’s new book (co-authored with Arabella Skinner) The Accountability Deficitis available now at Amazon and other book stores.
A German research institute has terminated the contract of a pro-Palestine professor of anthropology after criticizing the Israeli regime’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip.
The Max Planck Society said they had severed their relationship with “highly acclaimed” academic Ghassan Hage over a set of social media posts that they said were “incompatible” with the society’s values, media reported this week.
The leading German research institution added that “racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred, and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society.”
The Lebanese-Australian Melbourne University professor, who had posted a series of pro-Palestine posts on social media condemning the Israeli regime forces’ months-long genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza, criticized the Max Planck Institute for its decision to sever its ties with him over his support for peace.
He said he could live with being characterized as having “incompatible values” with the German institution; however, “implying that I am a racist, I cannot accept.”
Since the Israeli regime launched the genocidal war on Gaza in early October, Germany has seen an escalating crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy, with rallies and Palestinian flags banned in many parts of the country.
Events and rallies where pro-Palestinian speeches were held have been banned in schools, and the traditional keffiyeh scarfs are also barred.
Samidoun, a group that advocates for Palestinian prisoners, was banned in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October attack.
Pro-Palestinian voices have also been widely silenced with cultural institutions reporting pressure to cancel events featuring groups critical of Israel.
The Frankfurt Book Fair canceled a planned award ceremony for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli in October.
Oyoun Cultural Institution’s state funding was cut in November after hosting an event for a Jewish-led organization that supported the BDS movement against Israel, a movement that Germany’s Bundestag classified as anti-Semitic in 2019.
Also, pro-Palestine British playwright, Caryl Churchill, was stripped on October 31 of the European Drama Prize she had received in April in recognition of her life’s work, over her support for Palestine.
Here is the text of the expert report on Mann v. Simberg/Steyn in 2020 that I prepared at the request of Mark Steyn’s counsel.
My report, along with all other expert reports from both sides except for Abraham Wyner, were not admitted into evidence.
In my opinion, my report provides some much needed context for the trial. Here is a formatted pdf of my complete expert report [Curry Steyn Mann]
Report of Judith Curry, Ph. D.
I submit this report under D.C. Superior Court Civil Rule 26(a)(2)(B) & (C) as both fact and expert witness to address the subject matter on which I expect to present evidence and to summarize the facts and opinions on which I expect to testify. This report includes my observations and opinions as a lay and expert witness concerning three principal topics: (I) the nature of the scientific and public controversy concerning the Hockey Stick graph; (II) whether the Hockey Stick graph can be regarded as ‘fraudulent’; and (III) Michael Mann’s role in the downward spiral of climate science discourse. I present sections (I) and (III) mostly in my capacity as a fact/lay opinion witness and section (II) in my capacity as an expert witness.
SUMMARY
This report addresses the issue of whether it is reasonable to refer to the Hockey Stick graph as ‘fraudulent’ in the course of the public debate on climate change.
What is the nature of the scientific and public controversy concerning the Hockey Stick?
It is my opinion that the Hockey Stick has generated a dynamic and heated debate about its significance and its flaws. Since its publication, Mann’s Hockey Stick has been the subject of intense and often polemical comment and argument in: (a) peer-reviewed, scientific publications critical of the Hockey Stick; (b) analyses of the science behind the Hockey Stick on technical climate blogs; (c) published books on the Hockey Stick controversy; (d) articles by leading science journalists in the mainstream media; (e) online encyclopedia entries on the ‘Hockey Stick Controversy’; (f) Congressional hearings and investigations related to the Hockey Stick; and (e) the personal controversy surrounding Michael Mann in his efforts to defend the Hockey Stick and to thwart his critics.
2. Is it reasonable to regard the Hockey Stick as ‘fraudulent’?
It is my opinion that it is reasonable to have referred to the Hockey Stick in 2012 as ‘fraudulent,’ in the sense that aspects of it are deceptive and misleading:
Image falsification: Mann’s efforts to conceal the so-called “divergence problem” by deleting downward-trending post-1960 data and also by splicing earlier proxy data with later instrumental data is consistent with most standards of image fraud.
Cherry picking: Evidence shows that Mann engaged in selective data cherry picking to create the Hockey Stick, and that this cherry picking contributes to the perception of a “fraudulent” Hockey Stick by journalists, the public and scientists from other fields.
Data falsification (the ‘upside-down’ Tiljander proxy): Substantial evidence shows that Mann inverted data from the Tiljander proxies in a version of the Hockey Stick published in 2008. Mann did not acknowledge his mistaken interpretation of data. Even after published identification of the mistake, this mistake has propagated through subsequent literature including the IPCC 4th Assessment Report.
3. What is Mann’s role in the downward spiral of climate science discourse?
It is my opinion that the scientific discourse surrounding climate change in general, and the Hockey Stick in particular, has deteriorated in civility and professionalism, and that Mann has played a significant and active role in this corrosion and unprofessional degradation of tone. Mann’s approach to public discourse about his work and broader topics in climate change has contributed much to the hostility and animosity that characterize and mark these exchanges. My opinionis based on: (a) the norms of science and scientific discourse; (b) Mann’s withholding of data from his peers; (c) Mann’s efforts to stifle skepticism; and (d) Mann’s attacks on scientists who disagree with him.
THE SCIENTIFIC AND PUBLIC CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING THE HOCKEY STICK
The Hockey Stick is a graph of global temperatures for the last 600 to 1000 years, reconstructed from tree rings and other so-called proxy data. Its name comes from its shape – a long flat ‘handle’ representing comparatively stable temperatures in earlier centuries, followed by a dramatic uptick – the ‘blade’. The Hockey Stick graph was originally published in two papers co-authored by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes (MBH98, MBH99)[1]. MBH98 included a 600-year reconstruction and MBH99 included a 1000-year reconstruction.
Although Mann had only recently received his Ph.D., he was named as a lead author for a chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR), published in 2001. The Hockey Stick graph appeared seven times in the IPCC TAR, and appeared as the backdrop in the IPCC press conference announcing the findings of the report. Rather than displaying all of the long-term temperature reconstructions considered by the IPCC TAR, the opening figure of the Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers highlighted a graph of temperature reconstructions based only on the MBH99 paper.
Following the public release of the IPCC TAR, the Hockey Stick was regarded as central to the IPCC’s case for global warming. The Hockey Stick was, for a time, arguably the most important graph in the world. Its message of unprecedented warmth at the end of the twentieth century was a vital part of the campaign to persuade the public that mankind had changed the world’s climate.
Since publication of the Hockey Stick in Mann’s paleoclimate reconstructions of temperatures (MBH98/99) and its prominence in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR; 2001)[2], there has been substantial scientific controversy over the methods that Mann and his co-authors used in this research. The controversy extends to the results of their analysis, which contradicted existing geological and historical knowledge of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
Of particular note are two papers published by McIntyre and McKitrick in 2005 that challenged the MBH98/99 analyses (section IIA). These papers motivated two Congressional investigations and hearings in 2006 (section IIE).
In November 2009, the unauthorized release of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UK) (“Climategate”) revealed that several scientists (including Mann) had evaded Freedom of Information Act requests for data, manipulated the peer review process, downplayed uncertainty about their research and attempted to squash disagreement and dissent from ‘skeptics.’ The publicity surrounding Climategate (Sections IIB, IIC) brought the Hockey Stick controversy back into the public debate on climate change, largely vindicating a range of concerns that had been raised by McIntyre and McKitrick.
The analysis presented in this section documents the controversy surrounding the Hockey Stick, without passing judgment on the merits (or not) of the original research or the criticisms.
As an active participant in the debate over climate change and the Hockey Stick, I recall the development of this debate.
I summarize this controversy by considering the following sources:
Scientific journal publications critical of the Hockey Stick
Critical analyses in technical climate blogs
Published books on the Hockey Stick controversy
Articles by leading science journalists in the mainstream media
Online encyclopedia entries on the ‘Hockey Stick Controversy’
Congressional Hearings and investigations related to the Hockey Stick
Yesterday, a jury in Washington, DC awarded renowned climate scientist Michael E. Mann more than $1,000,000 in damages in a defamation lawsuit he brought against two bloggers.1 I was a witness in the case and testified on Tuesday.2 Here, I’ll offer my thoughts on the case and some personal reflections on my experience.
Mann’s case alleged that he was defamed by statements made the bloggers more than a decade ago, which harmed his reputation and career (I won’t rehash the details here, but you can get a full accounting of the trial at this comprehensive podcast).3
The defense built their case around making three points to the jury.
One was to bring in experts to testify that Mann’s methods in producing the so-called “Hockey Stick” graph were manipulative, and thus critics of the Hockey Stick were factually correct in saying so. The second point was to demonstrate that the debate over climate during the time that the blog posts were written was intense and vitriolic, with Mann saying things about others that were worse than what the defendants said about him.4 Finally, the defense argued that Mann hardly put on a case — he provided no evidence or witnesses supporting his claims of damage to reputation or career.
In contrast, the prosecution was — in the words of the court, “disjointed” — and was reprimanded on multiple occasions by the judge, most notably for knowingly providing false information to the jury on alleged damages suffered by Mann.5 When I was cross-examined, Mann’s lawyer had considerable trouble getting basic facts right like timelines and who said what.6
Even so, in a trial that most neutral observers would surely see as favoring the arguments of the defense, Mann walked away with a resounding, comprehensive victory.7 How did that happen?
In my view, there were two absolutely pivotal moments in the trial.
One occurred when Mann was testifying and he explained that he felt that the bloggers were not just criticizing him, but they were attacking all of climate science, and he could not let that stand. As the world’s most accomplished and famous climate scientist, Mann intimated that he was simply the embodiment of all of climate science.
For the jury, this set up the notion that this trial was not really about Mann, but about attacks on all of climate science from climate deniers.
The second pivotal moment occurred when in closing arguments Mann’s lawyer asked the jury to send a message to right-wing science deniers and Trump supporters with a large punitive damage award.
Here is how an advocacy group called “DeSmog” accurately reported these dynamics:
Mann sued Simberg and Steyn for defamation, but the trial proved to be about much more than statements that harmed the scientist’s reputation — the entire field and validity of climate science was under scrutiny.
In closing arguments, Mann’s lawyer John Williams compared the climate deniers in this case to election deniers overall. “Why do Trumpers continue to deny that he won the election?” he asked the jury. “Because they truly believe what they say or because they want to further their agenda?”
He asked the jury to consider the same question about Steyn and Simberg: Did they believe what they wrote was the truth, or did they just want to push their agenda? . . .
“Michael Mann is tired of being attacked,” Williams told the jury. “You have the opportunity to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in a similar way” to Simberg and Steyn.
An underlying current throughout this trial has been that climate denialism, like what the two defendants practice, isn’t really about the science. It’s more about politics and policy that drives organizations and individuals to “attack the science and confuse the public . . .
This framing — climate deniers versus climate science — has also characterized mainstream media coverage. For instance, The Washington Post announced, on the day that the case went to the jury, that this case was part of a “mounting campaign” against “right-wing trolls” (below).
Prominent climate scientist or right-wing trolls? Which side are you on?
The case was formally about defamation, but in reality it was not at all about defamation.
As Michael Mann stated after the verdict, the case was really about politics and ideology:
Take a victory lap, Dr. Mann
This is about the defense of science against scurrilous attacks, and dishonest efforts to undermine scientists who are just trying to do our job … whose findings might prove inconvenient to certain ideologically driven individuals and outlets. It’s about the integrity of the science and making sure that bad actors aren’t allowed to make false and defamatory statements about scientists in their effort to advance an agenda.
The defense made a big mistake in thinking that it would be sufficient to win by proving their case while Mann chose not to put one on. That was wrong.
There is no equivalence here between the “renowned” Michael Mann and the “right-wing trolls” who deny climate science and support Donald Trump. The case, at least in this particular venue, was simply unwinnable no matter what cases were put on by the prosecution and the defense. Mann simply had to show up.
The fact that the jury awarded him only $2 in actual damages and $1,001,000 in punitive damages (send a message!) supports this interpretation — The defense won on merits, and Mann won on the framing and the politics.
What does the case mean for discourse about politically contentious issues that involve science? Science magazine reports that it means that we now need to be circumspect in how we engage these issues:
In a statement, Mann said, “I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech.”8
At the same time, the ruling could end up having a chilling effect on necessary public criticism of science, says Gene Policinski, a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation focused on First Amendment protections. People will need “to be more judicious in commentary. They might be more vague or circumspect.” And that could be to the detriment of the public, he says. “It’s important in today’s world for people to be aware of research that’s going on and having people both praise and criticize it openly.”
For Mann’s part, he signals that he is just getting started in his legal campaign against his opponents:
Asked about Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, [Mann’s lawyer] John Williams said, “They’re next.”
I would not be surprised to now see a flurry of lawsuits against people who have been critical of climate science or climate scientists. Such legal action may not be limited to climate — debate over Covid-19 also presents a target-rich environment for unwanted speech to silence. Watch this space.
Finally, let me offer some personal reflections on my experiences.
Form the start, my view was that this entire lawsuit was unnecessary and a waste of everyone’s time. People who I still would not recognize on the street said some mean things about Michael Mann on the internet. Welcome to public discourse in the 21st century. People say mean, false things about me on the internet every day — it goes with the many privileges of having outsized impact and voice. The case was never about the integrity of science or the political impact of right-wing trolls — it was always about Michael Mann.
As I stood in line with dozens of other people on Tuesday waiting to go through security to enter the courthouse, I wondered how we got here — how leading scientists and institutions of climate science became totally consumed with a battle against minor bloggers and political boogeymen.
When I entered the courtroom, I had a profound sense of sadness for Mann. He was alone with his lawyer — no family, no friends, no university officials, no adoring fans, no mainstream media. Totally alone. There were just a handful of observers in the room. As I said at the trial, Mann has not been the best colleague to me, but I am fine even so. Who knows what demons haunt him and why he behaves the way that he does. I do hope he can find peace at some point.
The larger issues here are not about Mann, but rather the continued failures within the climate science community to uphold fundamental norms of conduct among its own ranks. For instance, in the trial we learned that Penn State’s committee looking into Mann’s conduct following Climategate wanted to censure him for his behavior — apparently that was overturned upon the intervention of the Penn State president. There have been so many similar opportunities for leaders to take the off-ramp from escalated conflict and politicization, and the community instead chose to further conflict.
Like I said, it is just sad. And it is not over yet.
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