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The Lie That Net Zero is ‘Settled Science’

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | February 22, 2022 

Historically, the claim of consensus is the first refuge of the scoundrel; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.

Michael Crichton, PhD, MD, author, screenwriter and academic

Humans cause all or most of the changes in the climate by burning fossil fuel. We must stop using the most efficient fuel we have, one that supplies 85% of our energy needs, and sign up for a so-called Net Zero future. The rich will get richer, since they will control state-mandated transfers of once-productive capital into new untried technologies, and the poor will get poorer. Holidays, personal travel and energy will be rationed (for the masses), while meat-free diets will be the order of the day. There are disadvantages, admit the green, politically motivated zealots, but it has to be done. The Earth is on fire – the science is settled.

Except that it isn’t. The idea that humans are largely responsible for climate change is an unproven hypothesis. The claim that it is ‘settled science’ on which all specialists in the field agree is a political con. Over 40 years, climate models have produced wildly inaccurate warming forecasts that have never been right.

The political narrative of global warming got going in the 1980s, following the failure of the 1970s global cooling scare. The warming narrative had a good ride for 15 years, until the recent warming started to run out of steam. Over the last seven years, there has been a standstill in temperatures. This is part of what lies behind the recent rebranding of bad weather as ‘extreme’, and unscientific attempts to link solo events to long-term aggregate climate change. Record high temperatures among the jet aircraft at Heathrow, record “gusts” of wind off isolated sea cliffs – all are used to craft a political Armageddon narrative.

At the heart of the debate, or rather the public non-debate, is the role of carbon dioxide as a warming gas. CO2 does warm the planet and the Earth would be about 33°C cooler without it and the other greenhouse gases. But its warming properties become less effective as more of it enters the atmosphere. Doubling atmospheric CO2 does not double the warming – a point which the IPCC accepts. Climate models guess that such doubling causes global temperature to rise in a range from 1.5°C to 6°C. Recent scientific work suggests this estimate is way too high. The simple ‘settled’ science deduction that rising CO2 levels automatically lead to significantly higher temperatures fails to take much account of natural climatic variations. In addition, little cause and effect between CO2 and temperature can be seen in current, historical or geological records.

CO2, methane and ozone, along with the much more common water vapour, produce a greenhouse effect of reflecting heat back to the Earth only within certain bands on the infrared spectrum. This has led some scientists to suggest that CO2 becomes ‘saturated’ once it reaches a certain level. Most of the heat that is going to be trapped is already being radiated back by the CO2 molecules evenly distributed in the existing atmosphere.

It is fascinating science, but it is conducted away from mainstream media, most political circles and the Earth Sciences/Geography university departments. It is the last that seem to provide many of the vocal scientists promoting the ‘settled science’ narrative. Such ground-breaking work holds out the promise of a better understanding of the role of CO2 in the atmosphere. Only a blinkered following of a political agenda can explain why it is ignored.

The idea that the science surrounding changes in the climate is settled goes back a long time. In 2006, the BBC ran a one day seminar in secret to decide on its future climate editorial policy. The meeting was crucial in plotting future editorial guidelines. According to the former Sunday Telegraph journalist Christopher Booker, the new guidelines “would allow it to make its coverage of any issues relating to climate change more actively partisan than ever”. Booker continued: “Its obligations to remain impartial could be put aside, it argued, on the grounds that the official orthodoxy was now so overwhelmingly accepted that any dissent from it could be dismissed as too insignificant to be worthy of notice.”

In 2013, John Cook came up with the suggestion that 97% of scientists believed that humans cause global warming. Mr. Cook is a green activist, who runs a site called Skeptical Science with the intriguing strapline: “Getting sceptical about global warming scepticism”. His notion was given a huge boost when Barack Obama tweeted that 97% of scientists agree that climate change is “real, man-made and dangerous”. In fact the 97% figure, which is still widely quoted today, was quickly debunked. It was found that of the 12,000 abstracts rated, only 0.5%, or 65 papers, suggested that humans were responsible for more than 50% of global warming.

Since scientists differ widely in their view on the human contribution to climate change, the attempt to put a number on a so-called consensus is futile and meaningless. But it makes a good headline. Step forward Mark Lynas, with a recent raise on 97% to 99%. In fact, his study found only that 99% of scientists failed to explicitly quantify the effect humans were having on the climate.

Mr. Lynas has had a lively career in green activism and journalism, first coming to attention in 2001 when he threw a pie into the face of the sceptical climate economist, Bjørn Lomborg. He was behind the PR stunt in 2009 when the Government of the Maldives met under water to draw attention to rising sea levels. Happily, this is not a problem for the Maldives, since overall the islands have grown in recent years. In 2007 he wrote an article in the Guardian reporting on the possibility of global warming producing fuel air bombs caused by oceanic methane eruptions. These would be equivalent to 10,000 times the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, he claimed.

These days, Mr. Lynas is the Communications Strategist and Climate Lead for the Alliance for Science, a non-profit operation linked with Cornell University. Its primary source of funding is said to be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – another case, it appears, of following the money to find the billionaires pushing their pet green narratives and causes.

February 22, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Skepticism as a New Way of Life

BY JOAKIM BOOK | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | FEBRUARY 22, 2022

The 2020-2022 pandemic split parties and ideologues, separated friend from friend and family members from family members. Neighbors were dangerous, and strangers even more so: the invisible enemy stalking our lands overturned every other concern in life: The conflicts it spurred replaced bonds of affection with fear and hatred.

More than ever, we need calm and level-headed thinkers, honest and willing to admit past errors, with eyes wide open for the corruption of industry or government itself. In other words, we need as little politics as humanly possible. As I wrote in a previous piece: we need “people without a clear ideological position, and who can thus appeal to audiences across the political spectrum.”

Two sane figures recently attempted the impossible: to speak calmly to the other side, trying earnestly to explain what happened – Konstantin Kisin, of the popular show Triggernometry, and Columbia sociology professor Musa al-Gharbi.

Kisin begins his monologue with “You’re struggling to understand why some people are vaccine hesitant. Let me help you.”

He uses no study result, no appeal to the biological effect of the drug that has become the main symbol of the Covid conflict; no death rates or R0; no projection of spread or what number of lives lockdowns may or may not have saved. Instead Kisin, for 13 spellbinding minutes, walks us through the many good reasons that people had – before and during Covid – to distrust the elites in politics, business, and media. If this is a question of (dis)trusting the establishment (including “the” Science), you must ask what the establishment did to no longer deserve that trust.

The tale begins years ago, with the Brexit vote and with the election of Donald Trump. Those events shocked the pompous leaders of the universities, the pollsters who confidently said it wouldn’t happen, the media pundits who so convincingly described to us the madness of such prospects.

For a brief moment after the unthinkable had happened, if you recall, there was an earnest desire for inclusivity – for inviting in the views that had gone overlooked in the other half of these countries. Outlets like the New York Times made an effort to portray conservative views and show the kinds of people who had long felt alienated and ostracized from civilized society. As despicable and difficult it was for their core audience to see, revealing perspectives and objections is better than silencing and hiding them.

The efforts didn’t last long and in 2019 and 2020, the monolithic thoughts that dominate these institutions willingly put their blinders on – tighter and more aggressively than before.

Kisin’s final minute is the most powerful thing in these disease-ridden past two years:

“The same people who told you Brexit would never happen; Trump would never win, and that when he did win, it was because of Russian collusion, then because of racism; that you must follow lockdown rules while they don’t; that masks don’t work and then that they do; that protests during lockdowns are a health intervention; that ransacking Black communities in the name of fighting racism is mostly peaceful justice; that Jussie Smollett was the victim of a hate crime; that men are toxic; that there’s an infinite number of genders; that Covid didn’t come from a lab, and then that it probably did; that closing borders is racist, and then that it’s the most important thing to do; that the Hunter Biden story is Russian disinformation, and then that it’s not; that they would not take Trump’s vaccine, and then that you must take the vaccine; that Governor Cuomo is a great Covid leader, and then that he’s a granny killer and a sex pest; that the number of Covid deaths is one thing and then another; that hospitals are filled with Covid patients, and then that many of them caught Covid in hospital.

These are the same people now telling you that the vaccines are safe, you must take it, and if you don’t you will be a second-class citizen.

Understand vaccine hesitancy now?”

Like Steve Carell’s character says in that glorious scene from The Big Short, “Short everything that guy has touched.” These guys have fooled us once too many times: we will not comply.

The long-read for the British newspaper The Guardian by Musa al-Gharbi is even more important, partly because he speaks to his own side and partly because the piece runs in an outlet that has been heavily on the vaccine-cherishing train. Building bridges begins by showing those on your own side of the river what the land looks like on its far side.

And al-Gharbi perfectly captured the mind of the current skeptic. He lists, bullet-point by bullet-point, the clear and sensible reasons why anyone would refuse to follow along. To most of his audience, these vaccines are fantastic miracles, life-saving devices, their impact ending the pandemic in one fell swoop: “failure to comply with the directives of public health officials,” writes al-Gharbi, has thus seemed insane to the audience he addresses – probably “driven by some pathology or deficit.”

“debates turn around identifying the primary malfunction of ‘those people’: Are they ignorant? Brainwashed? Stupid? Selfish and apathetic? All of the above? Left off the menu is the possibility that hesitancy and non-compliance may actually be reasonable responses to how experts and other elites have conducted themselves, both before and during the pandemic.”

The vaccines were developed too fast, without the long and rigorous testing regimes we usually apply to pharmaceuticals to ensure efficacy, correct dosage, the target demographics, safety, and observation of long-term harm (if those safeguards are optional and superfluous, why do we have them in normal times…?). Both Biden and Harris vocally pushed against “Trump’s vaccine,” but when the power of government passed into their hands, the tune was suddenly very different. Many people smelled a political rat.

Dr. Fauci himself has engaged in noble lie after noble lie to get people to do what he says is crucial for them: if he lied about the masks and then the Wuhan lab financing and then herd-immunity targets, why should anyone believe that he hasn’t lied about more things? That the advice his agency gives out is sound? That the science he says he represents is as all-encompassing and definitive as he and others deferring to him let on?

Step by step, month by month, and variant by variant, writes al-Gharbi, the figures of vaccine efficacy kept dropping:

“the main benefit of vaccination has been revised down dramatically – from outright preventing infections to reducing severe infections – even as people are encouraged to get more and more shots in order to achieve that benefit.”

But the official advice remained, intensified even, as did the public’s discourse. Somehow, the anger against the unvaccinated strengthened.

This is not what we were promised when, in early 2020, we stoically and proudly began sacrificing aspects of our personal lives for the public good. On top of that al-Gharbi points to the billions that Big Pharma makes out of vaccines – a point that should weigh heavily on The Guardian’s readership. And harms stemming from vaccines cannot be pursued in court, as the US government shielded the companies from liabilities in order to speed up the vaccine-creation process.

Add misleading statistics, former MSNBC hosts losing their minds, modeling predictions gone haywire and it isn’t hard to see why many people want to opt out. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and the only tangible act of dissent that most people have is refusing a needle in their arm.

In genuine scientific efforts, admits al-Gharbi, people are routinely wrong – that’s how the process works and how the sum knowledge of humanity improves. Instead, in the plague years we received

“spokespeople (and “Trust the Science” stans) [who] regularly concealed uncertainties, suppressed inconvenient information and squashed internal dissent in an ill-conceived effort to seem maximally authoritative. Rather than enhancing confidence among skeptics, these moves often made authorities seem incompetent or dishonest when they were forced to change their positions.”

There are few public officials who haven’t shunned the rules they themselves made, but of course we all shun the rules – they’re impossible to live under. The hypocrisy just looks so much worse when it’s the rulemaker himself or herself doing it. al-Gharbi’s summarizing paragraph is almost as powerful as Kisin’s:

“In a world where the experts are regularly wrong but continue to project high levels of confidence even as they change their minds and update their policies, where elite narratives about the crisis often seem to be inappropriately colored by political and financial considerations, where those who share one’s own background, values and interests do not seem to have a seat at the table in making the rules – and especially among populations that have a long history of neglect and mistreatment by the elite class (leading to high levels of pre-existing and well-founded mistrust even before the pandemic) – it would actually be bizarre to unquestioningly believe and unwaveringly conform to elite guidance.”

This is the story that those skeptical of vaccines see: a dissonance between official words and reality that no amount of social ostracism or edicts from on high can eliminate. This is the story of a tribe of navel-gazing authoritarians imposing rules on the rest of us, rules that don’t make sense, that are routinely flaunted by their proponents, and in aggregate don’t achieve the goals they’re said to achieve.

There is no reason to puzzle about the loss of trust and the rise of grave skepticism about elite plans for our lives.

February 22, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

World Economic Forum pushes digital ID system that will determine access to services

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | February 22, 2022

The World Economic Forum (WEF), an international organization that works to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,” recently published its latest dystopian proposal – a far-reaching digital ID system that will collect as much data as possible on individuals and then use this data to determine their level of access to various services.

This digital ID proposal is outlined in a report titled “Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries” and builds upon a digital ID framework that the WEF has published previously.

Under this framework, the WEF proposes collecting data from many aspects of people’s “everyday lives” through their devices, telecommunications networks, and third-party service providers.

The WEF suggests that this data collection dragnet would allow a digital ID to scoop up data on people’s online behavior, purchase history, network usage, credit history, biometrics, names, national identity numbers, medical history, travel history, social accounts, e-government accounts, bank accounts, energy usage, health stats, education, and more.

Once the digital ID has access to this huge, highly personal data set, the WEF proposes using it to decide whether users are allowed to “own and use devices,” “open bank accounts,” “carry out online financial transactions,” “conduct business transactions,” “access insurance, treatment,” “book trips,” “go through border control between countries or regions,” “access third-party services that rely on social media logins,” “file taxes, vote, collect benefits,” and more.

In this Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries report, the WEF positions this digital ID framework as the part of the solution to a “trust gap in data sharing” and notes that vaccine passports, which were mandated across the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, do “by nature serve as a form of digital identity.”

The WEF also praises the way vaccine passports have allowed governments to harvest data from their populations without “notice and consent”:

“At a collective level, vaccine data is an incredible public health asset. The United Kingdom Government in particular has acknowledged this and has suggested that anonymization, pseudonymization and data shielding techniques could be harnessed in a controlled environment to allow for the reuse of that highly sensitive data. In such cases, notice and consent is not required per se for the reuse of the data but the intermediary processes the data undergoes must be done in a controlled environment so that the findings of the data set are made available rather than the data itself.”

Additionally, the WEF provides a specific example of how digital IDs could be used to authenticate a user (by using fingerprints, a password, or identity verification technology) and decide whether they should be granted access to a bank loan by judging their profile (which may include their biometrics, name, and national identity number) and history (which may include their credit, medical, and online purchasing history).

The WEF goes on to suggest that digital IDs will “allow for the selection of preferences and the making of certain choices in advance” and ultimately pave the way for “automated decision-making” where a “trusted digital assistant” “automates permissions for people and effectively manages their data across different services” to “overcome the limitations of notice and consent.”

This push for an invasive digital ID system from the WEF follows it proposing other similar surveillance systems such as turning your heartbeat into a digital ID. Throughout the pandemic, the WEF has consistently advocated for vaccine passports and digital ID.

Beyond these specific proposals, the WEF is infamous for its globalist and transhumanist agendas such as the “Great Reset” (which proposes that people will “own nothing” and “be happy”) and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (which, according to WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, will lead to “a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities”).

Governments and private corporations are increasingly embracing digital IDs. Some governments are also pushing a similar notion – social credit-style apps that monitor citizens’ behavior and reward them for engaging in state-approved actions.

February 22, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

As a former MEP, I know how much the EU has destabilised Ukraine

By Paul A. Nuttall | RT | February 22, 2022

Eight years ago, a democratically elected president was removed from office by protesters waving European Union flags. Viktor Yanukovych had been elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 to serve a five-year term. His time in office was, however, brought to an abrupt end when he was removed for his refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU.

The first decade of the 21st century was a golden period for the EU. The euro currency had been launched, the bloc was expanding, and Eurosceptic movements in its existing member states had barely got off the ground. The federalist ideologues in Brussels confidently believed that this was to be the EU’s century, and nothing could prevent it from accruing more powers and expanding further eastwards.

After the accession of central European countries and the Baltic states, Ukraine was the next logical step –highlighted by a vote in the European Parliament in 2005, which floated the possibility of Ukraine eventually joining the bloc.

As a consequence, EU cash was poured into Ukraine as a precursor to eventual accession. The first step towards this eventuality was a deepening of economic ties, and to this end an association agreement was initiated in 2012. However, after more than a year of protracted negotiations, Yanukovych refused to sign the agreement in November 2013, which set off a chain of events that eventually led to his downfall.

Protests erupted because of the president’s refusal to sign. Kiev became the center of the uprising and the city’s Independence Square was occupied by demonstrators waving EU flags, leading to the protests becoming known as ‘EuroMaidan’. By early 2014, however, the protests were turning into violent clashes with the authorities, and law and order was clearly breaking down. As a result, many people sadly lost their lives.

On February 21, a compromise was reached between Yanukovych and opposition politicians, and it was agreed that early elections would be held. This was to prove insufficient, and the following day the police gave up attempting to guard the presidential palace and the parliament buildings. The protesters therefore freely made their way in unmolested. In what became known as the Revolution of Dignity, Yanukovych was removed as president by the Ukrainian parliament and forced to flee.

This was all reported as some great upswell of the people – a democratic uprising against an oppression. Yet when something similar happened in the US on Capitol Hill in January 2021, the same liberal media went berserk and denounced President Trump’s supporters as dangerous fascists. Can anyone else spot the double standards here?

Now Yanukovych may have been a bad president, but that is not really the point. He was elected to serve a five-year term, and if the electors wanted rid of him, and it seems a sizeable number did, then they could have waited another year and voted him out of office. That is, after all, how democracy works. Nevertheless, with Yanukovych out of the way, the Ukrainian government signed the association agreement with the EU in March 2014.

The EU proudly holds itself up as a defender of democracy – although anyone who understands how it really works knows what a contradiction this is – so you would assume that Brussels would have roundly denounced these ugly scenes in Kiev. But no, EU chiefs instead acted as enthusiastic cheerleaders.

Jerzy Buzek, the then-head of the powerful European People’s Party in the European Parliament, travelled to Ukraine “to express the support of the EPP family for the Ukrainian people and their European aspirations in light of the Euromaidan protests.” Similarly, Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and uber-EU federalist MEP, turned up in Kiev and praised the protesters as “brave and courageous” for supporting “European values, European principles and democracy.” Moreover, a week after the toppling of Yanukovych, the European Parliament passed a resolution which “pays tribute to those fighting and dying for European values” and “commends the people of Ukraine on the orderly change in power and on their civic resilience in the past few months.”

I was an MEP at the time and in Brussels we were given a binary choice: you either supported the EU’s eastward expansion and the eventual accession of Ukraine, or you were denounced as a Russian sympathiser or even worse. The easy thing to do would have been to stay quiet and not speak out, but a few of us could see that the move eastward was provocative and foolish, and we said so.

My old party leader, Nigel Farage, made this point in a televised debate with the then British Deputy PM Nick Clegg. He said that in his opinion the EU had “blood on its hands” for “destabilising” Ukraine. Statements like this, which certainly had their roots in a most inconvenient truth, were met with howls of derision. We were also accused of letting our dislike for the EU cloud our judgement. Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth. We could see that the EU’s ambition to incorporate Ukraine was only serving to fan the flames and create a fissure from east to west in an already divided country.

Additionally, we knew that although the politicians wanted the EU to expand further eastwards, the people did not. We had witnessed first-hand the huge influx of central Europeans into our countries and thought that adding another 45 million Ukrainians to the bloc would only exacerbate the problem.

Proof that we were correct on this point was provided in the Netherlands in April 2016, when the Dutch people rejected the EU’s association agreement with Ukraine in an ‘advisory referendum’. Indeed, over 60% voted against the agreement, which had already been signed. The result, however, was largely ignored and the Ukraine-EU association agreement came into force in September 2017.

The EU therefore cannot escape shouldering its portion of responsibility for what is happening today in Ukraine. The bloc’s desire to drive further eastwards was always going to cause friction, and it was obvious that Ukraine was going to end up being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

In 2014, the EU turned a blind eye to the mob because it suited its objectives, and in doing so it helped lay the foundations for the horrible situation we find ourselves in today. It is not as if some of us didn’t raise warnings at the time – but unfortunately it seems no one was listening.

Paul A. Nuttall is a historian, author and a former politician. He was a Member of the European Parliament between 2009 and 2019 and was a prominent campaigner for Brexit.

February 22, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Fear and Loathing in Washington

Biden Regime Crimes Against Humanity

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 22, 2022

One can frequently disagree with government policies without necessarily regarding them with disgust, but the Joe Biden Administration has turned that corner, first with its senseless promotion of a new Cold War that could turn hot with Russia and, more recently, with its actions undertaken to undermine and punish Afghanistan. The fact that the White House wraps itself in the sanctimonious, self-righteous twaddle that is so much the hallmark of the political left is bad enough, but when the government goes out of its way to harm and even kill people around the world in pursuit of an elusive global dominance it is time for the American people to rise up and say “Stop!”

As a former CIA operations officer, I departed government service in 2002 in part due to the impending invasion of Iraq, which I knew was completely unjustified by the web of largely fabricated information that was flowing out of the Pentagon to justify the attack. In the years since I have been appalled by the Obama era attacks on Syria and Libya as well as by the assassinations and cruise missile strikes carried out under Donald Trump. But all of that was a Sunday in the park compared to the hideous nonsense being pursued by Biden and his crew of reprobates. Trifling with the use of force as part of negotiations intended to go nowhere over Ukraine could well by misstep, false flag or even design escalate into nuclear war ending much of the life on this planet as we know it, and we are now also witnessing the cold, calculated slaughter of possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians just because we have the tools at hand and believe that we can get away with it. What we are seeing unfold right in front of us goes beyond appalling and it is time to demand a change of course on the part of a runaway federal government that is drunk on its own self-assumed unbridled right to exercise total executive authority over vital issues of war and peace.

I am most particularly shocked and dismayed over what the Biden Administration did to Afghanistan on February 11th, which is unambiguously a crime against humanity. On that day the President of the United States Joe Biden, still smarting from the botched departure from Afghanistan and low approval ratings, issued an executive order invoking emergency powers stipulating that the $7 billion in Afghan government money being held and frozen in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York would be retained by the US and divided in two.

Half of the $7 billion would be placed in a US government administered trust fund. The money would in theory go to fund humanitarian relief in Afghanistan to be carried out by agencies unidentified but presumed to be acting in coordination with the barracudas at the Treasury Department while the other half would go to benefit the victims of 9/11. This money is not just “frozen assets,” it is the entire reserve of the Afghan central bank, and its appropriation by the US will destroy whatever remains of the formal Afghan economy, making Afghanistan entirely reliant on small rations of foreign aid that come through channels unconnected with the Afghan government.

The other half of the story is that Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11 but instead became a victim of the US lust for revenge. After 9/11, the Taliban government offered to turn over Osama bin Laden to the United States if Washington were able to provide evidence that he was somehow involved in the attacks in New York and Virginia. The George W. Bush Administration was unable to do so, but chose to invade instead.

Afghanistan now has a government that is recognized by the United Nations and many other countries, though not by Washington, which insists that the Taliban are terrorists. Sanctions pressure being exerted by Washington on the new Taliban dominated regime has inter alia brought about a major humanitarian disaster, with various international agencies predicting that many thousands of Afghan civilians will die of starvation because there is no money available to provide relief. The United Nations has reported that three-quarters of Afghanistan’s population has plunged into acute poverty, with 4.7 million people likely to suffer severe or even fatal malnutrition this year.

The money in New York unambiguously belongs to the Afghan government and the country’s central bank. It is not money that came from the United States, which means that what Biden, who is already stealing Syria’s oil, is engaging in yet one more large scale theft, this time from people dying from famine and disease. Furthermore, as the US was de facto an occupying military power in Afghanistan, the responsibility to protect the civilian population is explicitly required under the articles of the Geneva Convention, to which the US is a signatory. That Washington will watch many thousands of civilians die because it has used its position as an occupying power to steal money that might alleviate the suffering is unconscionable and amounts to a war crime.

Undoubtedly the half of the money allegedly allocated for humanitarian relief will be directed to organizations that will do Washington’s bidding in terms of how the aid is distributed and who gets it. It is being reported that it will take months to set up the aid network, by which time thousands will die. That is to be expected and may have been intentional. And as for the other half of the money directed towards 9/11 “victims,” just watch how that plays out. There are undoubtedly instances of Americans who lost multiple and even cross generational family members at 9/11 and are still in need of assistance. Fine, that is a given, but why punish the Afghans to deal with that? And as soon as the money is on the table you know exactly what will happen. All the shyster lawyers working on a percentage of the payoffs will come out of the woodwork and the major beneficiaries of all the loot will be people who know how to manipulate and game the system. That is what happened to the billions that came raining down as a consequence of the insurance claims on the World Trade Center and also in the distribution of other monies that followed. You can bank on it.

Washington has become adept at lying to cover up its crimes overseas, but foreigners, who are not likely inclined to read the Washington Post and are directly affected by the deception, frequently have a more facts-based understanding of what exactly is going on. And it is why no one any longer trusts the United States. And, it is interesting to note how inevitably the lying by the US government is both bipartisan and inclined to blame the victim as a fallback position. This was seen in Donald Trump’s assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani over two years ago. Soleimani was in Baghdad for peace talks and was falsely accused by the White House of preparing to attack American soldiers. There is also the more recent assassination of alleged ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and killing of 13 additional women and children in Syria where accounts of villagers don’t quite square with the Pentagon version of what allegedly took place.

And then there is a long-concealed atrocity also in Syria which took place in the town of Baghuz in March 2019. At least 80 mostly women and children died in an attack by American F-15 fighter bombers, which was only reported in the media in November 2021. Reportedly, a large crowd of women and children were seen by photographic drones seeking shelter huddled against a river bank. Without warning, an American attack jet dropped a 500-pound bomb on the group. When the smoke cleared, another jet tracked the running survivors and dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of them. Military personnel at the Udeid Airbase in Qatar watching the attack by way of the drone camera reportedly reacted in “stunned disbelief” at what they were witnessing. A Pentagon cover-up followed and to this day the official comment on the attack is that it was “justified.”

So, by all means go and listen to lying Jen Psaki and pencil neck Ned Price or to Secretary of State Tony Blinken and possibly to the ultimate nitwit himself, President Honest Joe Biden. Or you can just pick up a New York Times or Washington Post where deliberately leaked government lies are backed up by what the newspapers pretend to be editorial integrity. These folks just might drop us into a nuclear war or could possibly continue in their larcenous ways to rob the world. Sooner or later the chickens will be coming home to roost and accountability for America’s war crimes will be demanded. Stay tuned.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

February 22, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Trudeau’s West Grey accuser was much younger than first thought

justin_trudeau_yearbook_07

The Buffalo Chronicle | October 19, 2019

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s underage accuser was much younger at the time of their relationship than was first thought, her father tells The Chronicle. Some in the public discourse pegged the accusor at 17 years old. That is inaccurate.

“She was much, much younger than that,” the wealthy Canadian businessman told The Chronicle yesterday. He was not a party to the $2.25 million mutual non-disclosure non-disparagement agreement that she signed, in exchange for her continued silence, on the Wednesday evening of October 9th.

The terms of that agreement prevent both the accuser and Trudeau from acknowledging “any aspect” of that relationship, without triggering a six-to-seven-figure liquidated damages clause. That penalty starts at $500,000 and scales up, depending on the magnitude of the breach.

The accusor’s father shared with The Chronicle a password-protected digital copy of that agreement, giving us limited access to it for several hours on the condition we would make no copies and not distribute. Doing so could have jeopardized the terms of the agreement, which imposes damages on either party in the event they acknowledge or discuss the relationship publicly.

He does not believe his discussion of that agreement’s existence is a violation of its terms since he was not a party to it. He did not acquire the document from his daughter; it was incorrectly CC’d to him on an email between the negotiating parties.

The two engaged in a long and steamy affair on- and off-campus while Trudeau taught drama and French at Vancouver’s prestigious West Point Grey Academy. He was discovered by his accusor’s father at their family home, which prompted private demands to school administrators that he be removed from his position immediately.

trudeau3-e1569882547925“There was a ‘small settlement’ at the time,” he says, but declined to elaborate.

The relationship was discovered several months after Pierre Trudeau‘s death. He died on September 28th, and was eulogized by his son on October 3rd — an event that made him a rising political star, around whom much of Canada would swoon. His students were particularly fawning, friends say.

At the time, the family was told that the school’s standard employment agreement included confidentiality terms that would be binding on Trudeau after his departure.  As a matter of policy, the school does not comment on personnel matters.

Trudeau’s friends at the time say that the typically outgoing and exuberant young man was suffering through a bout of depression following his father’s death in 2000, and his brother’s death in 1997. They postulate that anything improper was likely a result of his fragile emotional state at the time, not because of any nefarious character trait.

“He was lonely and depressed for months,” one friend told The Chronicle.

At the time, Canada’s age of consent was 14 years old.

In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had that law changed, raising the age to 16, where the law sits today. Still, Canada outlaws sex between adults and people younger than 18 when the adult is in a position of responsibility for the wellbeing of that child.

Trudeau’s behavior would have been illegal at the time.

To date, Trudeau has not offered a public denial of The Buffalo Chronicle’s reporting. Instead, he has instructed his communications staffers to decline to answer those questions and to attack the credibility of this publication.

The Buffalo Chronicle has never — in our entire operating history — been sued for defamation or any other matter. We have never once received a cease and desist letter from the subjects of any article since we began publishing in 2014.

We have not received such a cease and desist letter from Mr. Trudeau.

Trudeau has used his relatively brief time as a teacher to shape his personal narrative when he first got into politics in 2008. He has used the experience to shape his political brand, often claiming to have ‘taught math’.

February 22, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

CDC Has Withheld COVID Data From Americans To ‘Prevent Vaccine Hesitency’: Report

By Steve Watson | Summit News | February 21, 2022

The New York Times reported this past weekend that the CDC has chosen not to publish huge amounts of COVID data, instead keeping it secret, because it fears that the information would cause ‘vaccine hesitancy’ among the American public.

The report notes that the withheld data includes information on boosters, hospitalizations, wastewater analyses, as well as critical information on COVID infections and deaths broken down by age, race, and vaccination status.

The justification for holding the information back? Fears that the data would be “misinterpreted” and lead to “vaccine hesitancy,” according to the report.

In other words, it didn’t fit into the narrative that everyone must get vaccinated and boosted no matter who they are and what their situation is.

The report notes:

“Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

Ahhh, the plebs are not ready to know the truth.

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.”

The data has been withheld for more than a year, the report notes:

… the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.

As we have previously reported, CDC director Rochelle Walensky admits that the agency’s guidance on COVID has been based on what the government perceived people would accept.

“It really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate,” Walensky starkly admitted during an interview in December.

Walensky also acknowledged for only the first time last month that over 75% of COVID deaths were people “who had at least four comorbidities” and were “unwell to begin with.”

The comments were later edited by the media to make it seem like there have been fewer deaths related to comorbidities.

The CDC also for more than two years based its guidance on PCR tests, which it recently admitted are producing massive amounts of false positives.

February 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Jabbed and unjabbed must unite against the common foe – biotech

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | February 21, 2022

UNLESS rampant genetic experimentation is regulated, the whole population of the world will continue on a risky journey towards an unknown destination somewhere in a biotechnology future.

Today I want to reach out across a divide and back in time. At the beginning of the pandemic, the origin of Covid-19 was of concern to everyone – the question was ‘who was ultimately to blame?’ The dialogue was between those who thought its origin was zoonotic (jumped from an animal) and those thinking it was made in a laboratory. We never received a definitive answer to this debate, but nevertheless the New Zealand government decided in mid-2020 that the idea that Covid-19 came from a laboratory was a conspiracy theory. 

The immediate value to Jacinda Ardern’s government should be obvious: if Covid-19 came from an animal it was a natural virus requiring the time-honoured solution of a vaccine. If it came from a biotechnology laboratory, there would be an issue of trust – could the same people who created Covid-19 be trusted to cure it?

Moving to the present day, genomists have made real progress in resolving the debate around the origins of Covid-19. Some genetic sequences in Covid-19 have been found in mutated strains of HIV which appear to have no place in any animal viruses and some genetic constructs of Covid-19 are not natural at all, but are identical to genetic sequences patented before the pandemic by Moderna – a company who created a Covid-19 mRNA vaccine. The details are technical but the process of researching the connections has been rendered accessible to a lay person.

In general, the debate about Covid-19 origins has swung strongly back towards a laboratory origin, especially considering that it is now clear that the early insistence on a zoonotic origin was mainly from scientists involved in the experiments at the Wuhan lab.

This gives us all a completely different perspective about that other crucial debate between the pro-vaxx and anti-vaxx camps (let’s leave aside for a moment the supporters from both camps who are anti-mandate). Both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are facing a common foe – risky biotechnology experimentation leading either to a virulent illness or a novel vaccine with a high rate of adverse reactions. Whatever political end game emerges, both camps are left with a common problem: how to control biotechnology experimentation that threatens the stability of life itself (see my YouTube video The Pandemic of Biotechnology).

We are up against formidable obstacles:

  • Military interest in biotechnology continues for reasons of both offence and defence. More accidents are inevitable. No weapon ever invented remains unused.
  • Commercial investment in biotechnology is huge: there are fortunes to be made and lost depending on the outcomes of experimentation and regulation. Inevitably this means political lobbying and donations with strings attached.
  • There is a massive academic class of trained biotechnology researchers looking for employment and professional kudos who are dominating research perspectives and calling for more biotech funding in universities.
  • There are popular myths carefully curated through media support that biotech will ultimately cure all diseases and feed the world. As a result, biotechnology is seen by the public and medical professionals as the new frontier of medical and social miracles, but without any understanding of the huge risks and historical accidents. This has led to political myopia concerning biotech risk.

It is time to recognise that both the vaccinated and unvaccinated have been relying on the same pandemic exit strategy. The unvaccinated are trusting their natural immune system to protect them. The vaccinated are trusting their natural immune system to react appropriately to a vaccine and thereby protect them. So both groups are trusting their natural immune system. Perhaps what neither group fully realised was that biotech manipulation is a common foe which is busy offering novel products, some of which are capable of overwhelming our natural immune system whether we are vaccinated or not.

No exit strategy from the divisive horrors of the pandemic will be complete without instituting limitations on biotechnology experimentation. For that, the political myopia concerning biotech dangers needs to be overcome. This will require a massive educational effort and inviolable constitutional safeguards.

February 21, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Bill Gates is Ready to Capitalize on ‘The Next Pandemic’

21st Century Wire | February 20, 2022

As the old says goes: “there’s no rest for the wicked.”

That’s certainly the case with vaccine mogul Bill Gates.

As the world finally gets an opportunity to take a breath easy – after being suffocated by two years of pandemic theatre and 24/7 government and corporate pharmaceutical propaganda, the notorious architect the global COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ roll-out, billionaire tech monopolist turned pharmaceutical scion, Bill Gates, is still determined to realize his life’s ambition of achieve 100% global vaccine compliance.

To keep the game going, Gates has reemerged from the shadows this week to prepare the public for “the next pandemic.”

CNBC reports…

Bill Gates said Friday that the risks of severe disease from Covid-19 have “dramatically reduced” but another pandemic is all but certain.

Speaking to CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at Germany’s annual Munich Security Conference, Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said that a potential new pandemic would likely stem from a different pathogen to that of the coronavirus family.

But he added that advances in medical technology should help the world do a better job of fighting it — if investments are made now.

“We’ll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time,” Gates said.

Initially, Gates had been actively promoting each and every ‘variant’ – constantly talking-up the crisis in order to help maintain the perception of a constant demand for the highly controversial experimental COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ gene-jabs. This includes the most recent media creation known as the “Omicron” variant. But as the public began shunning the booster shots en masse, the media gradually began the abandon the Omicron narrative. Gates has clearly read the propaganda tea leaves, and has since started backtracking from some of his previous positions – and is even admitting that natural immunity is more effective than the dubious pharmaceutical-based synthetic immunity he’s been pushing for the last two years through the media and his proxy organizations the World Health Organization (WHO) and the GAVI vaccine alliance.

Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Gates said the worst effects have faded as huge swathes of the global population have gained some level of immunity. Its severity has also waned with the latest omicron variant.

However, Gates said that in many places that was due to virus itself, which creates a level of immunity, and has “done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.”

In order to further shield him from an increasing public backlash for his role in shamelessly promoting the ‘global pandemic’ and vaccine narratives, Gates has also carefully admitted the existence of comorbidities among the alleged COVID deaths.

“The chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure,” he said.

However, the vaccine kingpin is still lamenting his failure to reach 70% ‘penetration’ of the experimental mRNA toxic injections into the arms of the global population.

Gates said it was already “too late” to reach the World Health Organization’s goal to vaccinate 70% of the global population by mid-2022. Currently, 61.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.

He added that the world should move faster in the future to develop and distribute vaccines, calling on governments to invest now.

“Next time we should try and make it, instead of two years, we should make it more like six months,” Gates said, adding that standardized platforms, including messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, would make that possible.

It’s important for people to realize that Gates and his network are not finished in their plan to establish a global conveyor belt for experimental gene-based pharmaceutical injections – and he is already eyeing ‘the next pandemic’ in order to roll out the next phase of this globalist agenda. There is no shortage of funds either:

“The cost of being ready for the next pandemic is not that large. It’s not like climate change. If we’re rational, yes, the next time we’ll catch it early.”

Gates, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has partnered with the U.K.’s Wellcome Trust to donate $300 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which helped form the Covax program to deliver vaccines to low- and middle-income countries.

The CEPI is aiming to raise $3.5 billion in an effort cut the time required to develop a new vaccine to just 100 days.

It’s no coincidence either that Gates has just begun marketing his latest manifesto entitled, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.

“I’ve been following COVID since the early days of the outbreak, working with experts from inside and out of the Gates Foundation who are championing a more equitable response and have been fighting infectious diseases for decades. I’ve learned a lot in the process—both about this pandemic and how we stop the next one—and I want to share what I’ve heard with people. So, I started writing a book about how we can make sure that no one suffers through a pandemic ever again.”

To mark the occasion, Gates released this disturbing propaganda video – littered with many of the staged images and government tropes used to reinforce the COVID ‘global pandemic’ crisis narrative since the winter of 2020. Watch:

February 21, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Canadian MP CENSORED For Pointing Out WEF’s Corrupt Influence Over Trudeau Regime

By Jamie White | Infowars | February 19, 2022

A Canadian MP was shut down in Parliament Saturday after bringing up the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) influence over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet.

Conservative MP Colin Carrie pointed out how WEF founder Klaus Schwab once bragged that his Young Global Leaders group had “penetrated” Trudeau’s government before he was abruptly cut off by the speaker of the House of Commons.

“I had a constituent who wanted me to ask a qustion about outside interference to our democracy. Klaus Schwab is the head of the World economic Forum and he bragged how his subservice WEF has ‘infiltrated governments around the world’, he said that his organization had penetrated more than half of Canada’s cabinet,” Carrie stated.

“In the interest of transparency, could the member please name which Cabinet ministers are on board with the WEF’s agenda? My concern is -” Carrie continued before the Speaker abruptly cut him off, calling the “audio” of his remarks “really, really bad.”

At that point, New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Charlie Angus accused Carrie of spreading “disinformation” for simply asking about this disturbing relationship between Trudeau and the WEF.

The fact is, Carrie’s remarks are 100% accurate.

WEF founder Klaus Schwab is on video bragging that his organization “penetrated” Prime Minister Trudeau’s government:

Trudeau himself has met with the WEF founder numerous times over the years as Prime Minister, with Schwab even once bragging that Trudeau was more loyal to the WEF than to Canada.

https://twitter.com/TheNo1Waffler/status/1493702862471323661

Additionally, several members of Trudeau’s Cabinet are openly associated with the WEF, such as Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who serves as a governing member of the globalist body’s board.

Rather than openly discuss the clear conflicts of interest related to Trudeau’s relationship with the World Economic Forum, the liberal wing of Parliament instead resorted to their typical authoritarian method of censorship and gaslighting.

Remember, the WEF is the organization that claimed “you will own nothing, and you’ll be happy” as part of its Great Reset “Fourth Industrial Revolution” initiative.

February 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Before you save the planet, save the people who live on it

By Vijay Jayaraj – bizpacreview – February 12, 2022  

Climate change frequently dominates media coverage and political discourse. Why wouldn’t it when those advancing the apocalyptic agenda speak in terms of saving the planet? The state of the climate is nothing if not an “existential threat,” or so it is said.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that the motives of climate alarmists are as pure as the environment they envision. That they really do see their roles as saviors. Even so, there is a very large elephant in the room, which is that they seek to save the planet by killing its inhabitants — unwittingly or not.

Not only do climate enthusiasts refuse to acknowledge the issue of ongoing energy poverty for billions of people across the world, but they promote policies that exacerbate lack of access to affordable, reliable electricity. The socio-economic conditions of energy poverty, which can only be worsened by the forced replacement of fossil fuels with wind and solar, contribute to higher rates of both morbidity and mortality.

Lack of gas for cooking and heating is the major cause of death from indoor air pollution in the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) states, “Around 2.6 billion people cook using polluting open fires or simple stoves fueled by kerosene, biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste).” Around 4 million people among them die annually and many more millions suffer long-lasting illnesses.

Community-level energy poverty affects larger populations. Some regions that are home to hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia have no access to electricity. Among those who do have electricity, the supply is highly unreliable. From inadequate supplies of drinking water to intermittent power in health care centers, energy poverty poses an imminent threat to the lives of these people.

Death due to blackouts in hospitals has become a common event. A 2020 scientific study suggests that there is a possibility of between 3 to 105 additional deaths per 1,000 patients in grids with frequent blackouts. Problems “can range from postponing surgery, postponing accurate diagnoses for a needed surgery, permanent disabilities, and even to fatalities during surgery, due to failure of various medical equipment,” according to the study.

Climate alarmists are seemingly unaware of the billions of people who wouldn’t live to see the future if their basic energy necessities of today were not met by affordable and available fossil fuels. For people in extreme energy poverty, dreams of climbing the socio-economic ladder are impossible to achieve without coal, oil and natural gas. Rhetoric about “green” energy meeting these needs ignores the hard, physical reality that wind and solar can produce but a tiny fraction of the output of traditional generating sources..

Even if third-world governments — backed with foreign aid — install expensive micro-scale, off-grid renewable technologies, such systems are of a temporary nature incapable of meeting high baseload energy demand for either domestic or commercial use. They are of little or no use when there is no sun or wind.

The choice of energy source in the poorest areas is a matter of life and death in many cases. Regardless of where one stands on the issue of climate change and the supposed ability of government policy to avoid global warming, it is necessary that all agree on the immediate need for affordable and reliable energy for those who don’t have it.

Saving the planet must not mean rejecting fossil fuels to meet such needs. Otherwise, the clarion call of environmental activists is the death knell for the billions they would condemn to energy poverty.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Contributing Writer to the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, England. He resides in Bengaluru, India.

February 20, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Most Published Studies Exaggerated the Effects of Ocean Acidification – and Covid, Etc.

By Jennifer Marohasy | February 20, 2022

The concept of ocean acidification, and human-caused global warming more generally, could be described as containing a grain of truth embedded in a mountain of nonsense. Indeed, the projected large increase in atmospheric CO2 will at most cause a small reduction in pH – it will not turn the ocean acidic. Yet this is what is implied by the term ocean acidification. True acidification would require average pH to be reduced below 7.0, at which point seashells would indeed begin to dissolve. This is an impossible scenario, however, because of the ocean’s effectively limitless buffering capacity.

There is a newly published study by Jeff Clements and team that concludes many of the published studies on ocean acidification, especially those studies published in high impact journals and accompanied by sensational media reporting, have turned-out to be wrong, or at least exaggerated.

My colleague Peter Ridd describes the situation:

This problem with exaggeration of threats applies to many areas of science and has a name: The Decline Effect.

The Decline Effect goes like this: an early report, usually attracting huge media interest, predicts some sort of catastrophe. But when follow up work is done, usually with far better experimental procedure and far greater numbers of samples, the original report turns out to be wrong.

Jeff Clements’ team included Timothy Clark, Josefin Sundin and Frederik Jutfelt who were involved in a study last year proving that numerous reports by James Cook University’s coral reef centres on reef fish was totally wrong.

I co-authored a book chapter with John Abbot some years ago that explained:

Initial concerns about ocean acidification focused on organisms that construct their shells or skeletons from calcium carbonate. Such organisms are referred to as marine calcifiers and include not only corals, but also crabs, clams and conchs (sea snails).

Theoretically, and according to popular science magazines, all corals are already severely and negatively affected by ocean acidification. But this is not evident from methodologically sound studies undertaken at the Great Barrier Reef. A review of the growth rates of six, hard coral species at Lord Howe Island (Anderson et al. 2015) found marked variation in the growth rates of branching coral, while growth rates of the massive Porites coral were unchanged. The researchers suggested that a decline in the growth rates of the branching species could be attributable to a reduction in the calcium carbonate saturation state as a consequence of higher summer temperatures. A study measuring calcification rates for 41 long-lived Porites corals from seven reefs from the central Great Barrier Reef (D’Olivio et al. 2009), showed good recovery from the major 1998 bleaching event, with no significant trend in calcification rates for the inner reefs. Corals from the mid-shelf central Great Barrier Reef, however, did show a decline of 3.3%.

While most ocean acidification research has been focused on physiological processes, in particular calcification, there have also been studies on three common hard corals to look at their fertilisation, embryonic development, larval survivorship, and metamorphosis (Chua et al. 2013a; Chua et al. 2013b). These studies have found the early life-history stages were unaffected by reduced pH; there was no consistent effect of elevated CO2 alone, nor in combination with temperature.

Studies of the effect of very high CO2 levels (up to 2,850 ppm) on molluscs – including oysters, clams, scallops and conchs – have shown that these species will generally build their shells more slowly as CO2 levels increase (Ries et al. 2009). This same study showed that crabs and lobsters respond quite differently to the same elevated CO2 levels, showing a general increase in calcification rates.

This chart shows how quickly scientists could meet the demand for commentary in the new area of ocean acidification, including to support the theory of human-caused global warming.

The varied responses among different organisms reflect their differing abilities to regulate pH at the site of calcification, and:

  • the extent to which their outer shell layer is protected by an organic covering
  • the solubility of their shell, or skeletal mineral
  • the extent to which they use photosynthesis (Ries et al. 2009).

Of course, many marine organisms are not calcifiers, and some of these organisms have also been tested for a response to ocean acidification.

When seagrasses collected from three locations in the Great Barrier Reef region – Cockle Bay, Magnetic Island, and Green Island – were exposed to four different CO2 concentration levels for two weeks – with water temperature and salinity in the experimental tanks near-constant throughout – all three seagrass species exhibited enhanced photosynthetic responses (Ow et al. 2015). That is growth rates, observed after two weeks of exposure to an enriched CO2 environment in an indoor aquarium, were higher. This suggests that ocean acidification could mean more seagrass, which would be good for large marine mammals like dugongs (dugongs are vulnerable to extinction because of issues unrelated to changing ocean chemistry).

Also, contrary to expectations, laboratory investigations into the effects of three different CO2 treatments on anemonefish (commonly known as the clownfish) found that higher CO2 levels stimulated breeding activity (Miller et al. 2013). The breeding pairs from the fringing reefs of Orpheus Island on the Great Barrier Reef, where they are exposed to the highest CO2 levels, produced double the number of clutches per breeding pair, and 67% more eggs per clutch than the control. However, young anemonefish that were bred in high CO2 levels and high temperatures showed decreases in their length, weight, condition, and survival (Miller et al. 2012). Though these effects were absent or reversed when their parents also experienced the higher concentrations (Miller et al. 2013).

We concluded:

Most studies have been on single species in contrived laboratory conditions. They have been of short duration, and they have not considered the potential for adaptation. In the few instances where adaptation has been considered, it has been shown to significantly modify the impact of varying pH as a consequence of elevated levels of CO2.

All of this needs to be assessed against the reality that along the length and breadth of the Great Barrier Reef there are naturally occurring large daily fluctuations in pH, and that it is unclear as to what extent the current trends of apparent pH decline are part of existing natural cycles.

Most of the articles describe the effects of changes of pH on biological organisms; many of the claims are based exclusively on laboratory experiments (Riebesell & Gattuso 2015). However, a problem with laboratory experiments is that they cannot capture the complexities of the real world, not even the tremendous natural variability in ocean pH – which is a measure of ocean acidification.

Statistician John P.A. Ioannidis published a review of medical research back in 2005 entitled ‘Why most published research findings are false’ (Plos Medicine ). It included a comment that:

The majority of modern biomedical research is operating in areas with very low pre- and post-study probability for true findings.

The review by John Ioannidis is a devastating critic of the sad state of biomedical research. It is this same profession, biomedical research, that concluded we should fear Covid-19 and get vaccinated – with the results from the Pfizer trials withheld while emergency approvals were granted for the mass vaccination of citizens across the world against Covid-19.

We will no doubt have better insights, when studies like those by Jeff Clements into ocean acidification, are undertaken into the recent Covid-19 vaccine research. We may then be in a position to judge whether the apparent ineffectiveness of these particular Covid-19 vaccines, despite all the promises, can be best explained by corporate greed and mendacity, or simply flaws in the scientific method. Certainly there was pressure on medical researchers to find a quick cure, that could be administered as part of a global public health response, to what appeared in the beginning to be a deadly new virus much worse than the seasonal flu.

The British Medical Journal in an editorial dated 19thJanuary includes commentary that we don’t know enough about Covid-19 vaccines.

‘Today, despite the global rollout of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant-level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come,’ the editorial states. ‘This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.’

The editorial also accuses pharmaceutical companies of ‘reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims,’ pointing to Pfizer, whose Covid vaccine trial was ‘funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees’.

Of course, Peter Ridd lost his job at James Cook University for speaking truth to power. Those who continue to publish studies on ocean acidification, especially those studies published in high impact journals and accompanied by sensational media reporting, have most recently been rewarded by the Australian government with an additional $1billion in funding.  Some of this money will end-up funding more nonsense ocean acidification projects at James Cook University. It is unlikely that any of this grant money will be used to ensure that there is some quality assurance of the same research.

February 20, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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