London City Hall Tries to Put Pressure on Scientists Who Doubted Climate Policy – Report
Sputnik – 20.08.2023
London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office tried to “silence” scientists who called into question the effectiveness of the ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) policy promoted by the head of the city, The Telegraph reported on Saturday.
Shirley Rodrigues, the London Mayor’s deputy for environment and energy, told in emails to Imperial College London professor Frank Kelly that she was “really disappointed” by scientists publishing results that cast doubt on the effectiveness of Ulez, the newspaper reported, adding that the corresponding complaint was sent in November 2021.
In particular, Rodrigues said that she was “deeply concerned” about the damage done to the credibility of the Mayor’s office and Ulez. In response, Kelly promised to write a Ulez-friendly report, the report added.
The report stated that since 2021, Kelly’s research group has received over 800,000 pounds ($1.018 million) from the mayor’s office. However, the publication by scientists led to a cooling in their relations with the London city hall. This, in turn, caused the reluctance of representatives of the scientific community to write any new materials about Ulez, the newspaper noted.
The Ulez initiative was first announced by then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson in 2015. Later, Khan launched an initiative that included, among other things, the installation of special traffic signs and cameras. Since 2020, the London authorities have had to spend over 850,000 pounds to rebuild infrastructure for the initiative, which has been repeatedly damaged by vandals.
West has shown its ‘true Russophobic face’ – Lavrov
RT | August 18, 2023
Washington and Brussels have openly unleashed a hybrid war against everything Russian, dropping their masks after decades of pretending to be civilized and adequate international partners, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with International Affairs, published on Saturday.
“Many of our former partners have been concealing their Russophobic nature under the veil of hypocrisy, but have now shown their true face in all its glory,” he said. “However, there is also the flip side of the coin here, since the Global Majority saw the true face of those who went as far as [to] aspire to a monopoly in defining the so-called universal values.”
“Today’s West is steered by people like Josep Borrell who divide the world into a blooming ‘garden’ and ‘the jungle,’ where the latter clearly applies to most of humanity,” Lavrov added.
The West has spent decades cynically transforming neighboring Ukraine into a “hostile military bulwark against Russia by nurturing an entire generation of politicians ready to declare war on our shared past, culture and everything Russian,” according to Lavrov.
Western capitals even openly admitted that reaching a peaceful settlement in Ukraine was never part of their plan, and that the Minsk agreements were originally designed to “buy some time to prepare a military scenario and deliver weapons to Kiev.”
“I think that the essential thing we must understand in this regard is that the West wants to do away with our country as a serious geopolitical rival,” the top Russian diplomat said “They have not hesitated to use subversive methods and perform acts of sabotage, as was the case with the explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic Sea.”
Lavrov also accused Washington and its allies of using all possible coercive means to prevent Russia’s partners from engaging in economic and other kinds of cooperation, while also “making outrageous efforts to disconnect Russia from international cooperation mechanisms in culture, education, research, and sports.”
One thing that the West fails to understand, according to Lavrov, is that “Russia will use all means to defend its people and its vital interests,” and thus would be better for the opponents to realize that “confrontation with Russia is futile and switch to more civilized” means for achieving a balance of interests.
The “Wellness-to-Fascism Pipeline” Baffles Experts as Truth Marches On
Congregating and Caring about Your Health is Dangerous to our Democracy
BY IGOR CHUDOV | AUGUST 13, 2023
Be careful with your workouts! An article from the Guardian alerts us to a “wellness-to-fascism pipeline.”
“People who study conspiracy theories” are worried that joining gyms and trying to get healthy makes people descend into what these experts describe as fascism, explains author James Ball.
James has a peculiar idea of what fascism is, however:
According to James, only fascists question masks, lockdowns, or the BBC. Good people mysteriously become “fascists” when they join gyms or look after their wellness.
Some of the most dangerous people, believe it or not, are personal trainers!
Some people’s problems escalated when their personal trainer learned about their work. “I had three successive personal trainers who were anti-vax. One Belgian, two Swiss,” I was told by a British man who has spent most of the past decade working in Europe for the World Economic Forum, which organises the annual summit at Davos for politicians and the world’s elite.
The poor WEF chap above was even dropped by his personal trainer when his employment at the WEF was revealed:
When the trainer found out the man worked for the World Economic Forum, he was immediately cut off.
Most worryingly for the “conspiracy expert” Peter Knight, people of all political persuasions, right or left, end up in the same place when they realize that “everything is a lie”:
Peter Knight has the strangest explanation, by gender, as to why people “get sucked into conspiracy theories.”
He explains that men are drawn into conspiracies because of the “involuntary celibacy” movement.
It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk. This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the “incel” (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group.
Mind you, at the beginning of the article, James Ball discussed how personal trainers are the superspreaders of conspiracies. Have you ever seen an involuntarily celibate gym personal trainer?
His explanation of why women believe the same theories could not be more different! Women, it turns out, believe the same conspiracies as men because of the “female data gap”!
“Far too often, we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous,” she says. “But the blame does not lie with the women – it lies with the gender data gap. Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.”
There is a much simpler explanation as to why people believe the “Covid was lab-made” conspiracy theory, “Covid vaccine does not work” conspiracy theory, or “15-minute cities are promoted by the World Economic Forum” theory.
The explanation is that these theories are true. Both genders are capable of critical thinking, seeing the truth, and sharing it.
This simple explanation does not insult millions of thinking men by portraying them as “incels,” nor does it portray women as stupid creatures confused by the imaginary “gender data gap.”
Trying to find explanations for complicated but important events affecting us and not believing dishonest press is not fascism. God gave us brains for a reason – to think for ourselves! Critical thinking is the opposite of fascism, which requires uncritical obedience to the state ideology.
Despite its stupidity, the Guardian’s article exposes the most important social network that the press, fact-checkers, and the powers-to-be cannot control.
This social network is people physically and directly interacting with each other and sharing news and opinions.
It cannot be suppressed by means other than drastic lockdowns, which kept people at home in 2020. The gyms, far from being uniquely instrumental in developing critical thinking, are simply places where people congregate and share stuff while doing something pleasant. Thus, not surprisingly, gym-goers share explanations of current events with their peers without any censorship or any algorithmic intermediary.
The Guardian recognizes this:
Society’s discussion of QAnon, anti-vaxxers and other fringe conspiracies is heavily focused on what happens in digital spaces – perhaps too much so, to the exclusion of all else. The solution, though, is unlikely to be microphones in every gym and treatment room, monitoring what gets said to clients.
The conspiracy experts are baffled by this development and ironically blame “isolation,” even though the phenomenon they observe is rooted in physical interaction between people:
Jane has her own theory as to why her wellness group got radicalised and she did not – and it’s one that aligns with concerns from conspiracy experts, too. “I think it’s the isolation,” she concludes, citing lockdown as the catalyst, before noting the irony that conspiracies then kick off a cycle of increasing isolation by forcing believers to reject the wider world.
“It becomes very isolating because then their attitude is all: ‘Mainstream media … they lie about everything.’”
I do not think of myself and my dear subscribers as isolated: we congregate here, we read newspapers, although critically, and we interact with friends or relatives. Anyone can say anything they want in the comments. Am I wrong?
ULEZ – Another Imperial Con
Ulez Expansion Predicted to Cut Air Pollution by Just 1.5%
By Alex Kriel | Thinking Coalition | August 9, 2023
Listening to the discussion over Ulez expansion feels like an action replay of the way in which many were convinced to overreact to Covid, leading to policy responses which caused significantly more harm than good. The Ulez ‘discussion’ has all of the same elements, with modelled health benefits calculated by Imperial College and Mayor Khan’s justification that he is “saving lives”, implying that opponents are wannabe murderers. Of course, this time around, the public is thankfully much more sceptical.
In this short note, we wanted to set out how those ‘lives saved’ numbers are derived and to demonstrate that at best the numbers are seriously misrepresented and at worst completely wrong. In fact, applying the Government and Imperial’s own logic, there is a very strong case to say that the expansion of Ulez will, on balance, harm Londoner’s health when considering the downstream economic consequences of this policy.
The major flaw in Imperial’s model is the one-dimensional nature of its assumption that air pollution drives health and life expectancy. In the real world health is driven by a number of interacting factors with income being the primary driver. There are many assumptions one could dispute that (perhaps unsurprisingly) work towards inflating the claimed health benefits of reducing air pollution, but we focus only on the flaw of largely ignoring policy consequences.
The Imperial team presents several numbers, including: attributable deaths (3,600 to 4,100), improved life expectancy (five to six months) and life-years saved (6.1 million). We wanted to focus on the claimed benefits of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy in terms of life expectancy and life-years saved.
Before leaving attributable deaths, it is important to note that these are not in any sense deaths that can be avoided, nor are they deaths that are subject to reduction by the Transport Strategy. The figure appears to compare current death rates with death rates if all human emissions had been removed for all prior periods. It is a theoretical construct (similar to an unmitigated pandemic) and only a small fraction of this number would be theoretically impacted by road transport (around 15%). Only the going-forward numbers (life-years saved) relate to the Transport Strategy and there the benefits are relatively low at 0.4%. It is important to note that there has only ever been one death, of a young and chronically unwell girl ever recorded in England (56 million population) where the death certificate mentions air pollution. Tragic as this death clearly is, it again highlights the disconnect between the theoretical attribution number and actual deaths recorded; we suggest ignoring the attributable deaths figure.
Looking at the claimed benefits of implementing the Transport Strategy, it is possible for a layman to understand the main assumptions on which these health benefits are based. In summary, it is assumed that reducing 10 µg m-3 achieves roughly a 6% reduction in all cause mortality. Note however 10 µg m-3 is more than all anthropogenic PM 2.5 emissions as estimated for England as a whole, so any benefits are scaled down from 6%. So a 1 µg m-3 reduction generates roughly a 0.6% improvement in life expectancy (i.e., ten times less).
Looking at life-years saved and extended life expectancy, the key assumptions are poorly explained. For those in a hurry, the detail shows that all of the Transport Strategy initiatives to 2050 combined will deliver a projected 0.4% reduction in life-years lost to air pollution using projections to 2154. There is a claimed five to six month extension in life expectancy, so the life expectancy of a London male of around 80 years would be extended to around 80.4 years.
These gains are stated relative to a baseline and for some inexplicable reason the Imperial team has decided to use 2013 pollution levels to establish the baseline and in the process to ignore the available data for 2019. This serves to inflate the baseline.
The acid test is: are the results of modelling compatible with observed reality? And on that basis the Imperial Ulez modelling falls flat. The model covers the impact of the entire Transport Strategy to 2050 which covers many more steps than Ulez. The Imperial document is somewhat vague about what those steps are – they are cryptically referred to as 2025 LES, 2030 LES and 2050 LES. It is enough to note that the goal of Mayor Khan’s 2018 Transport Strategy is to “aim for 80% of all trips in London to be made on foot, by cycle or using public transport by 2041”. So the first thing to clarify is that the claimed 6.1 million saving of life years relates to a significant number of measures, well beyond Ulez expansion. In effect these combined steps will largely eliminate private car traffic.
The chart below is constructed from the Imperial material and shows that PM 2.5 µg m-3 population weighted (PWAC) pollution falls over a number of steps and Ulez on a standalone basis has a near zero impact. Also, you can also see that a fair chunk of gains have already been banked between 2013 and 2019.
The failure of Ulez to achieve any meaningful reduction in pollution is very clearly shown in a separate document prepared by Jacobs which looks at the impacts of Ulez only. The table below shows the impact of Ulez expansion on PM 2.5 µg m-3 concentration, with an estimated improvement of less than 2%.
There is a slightly better outcome for NOx pollutants which are reduced by 5.4% across Greater London. This feeds in to the health impact assessment which unsurprisingly shows near zero benefit from Ulez for PM 2.5 reductions, for most health-related metrics.
Looking at life expectancy, the report does acknowledge that due to the large population (around 8.9 million) and the extraordinary long time period over which these benefits are expected to crystalise (up to 2154) then there are around 1.5 billion life-years involved (years × population). For any stated benefit to be meaningful, it needs to referenced to the base case value. The 6.1 million life-years saved is then within the context of a total of around 1.5 billion life-years; this saving is around 0.4%. Correspondingly, the impact on life expectancy from all of the pollution schemes (not just Ulez) adds up to around 22 to 27 weeks additional life expectancy. In the context of male life expectancy of 80 years (roughly) this would improve to 80.4 years as a consequence of 30 years’ worth of restrictive climate policies (ignoring any economic consequences).
The core flaw in the calculation is the one-dimensional thinking that underpins this (and all similar calculations) in that all reductions in PM 2.5 concentrations lead to a reduction in the mortality rate. This thinking ignores any link between people’s incomes and health outcomes, which is the primary driver of health. This is the same dishonest cop out that Professor Ferguson made in his infamous Covid paper. This facilitates a myopic focus on ‘safety’ and generates solutions that do far more harm than good.
In setting out the methodology that states that health outcomes will improve with a reduction in air pollution on a more or less linear basis, the Government’s own figures show that real world data prove that this assumption is not correct (or at least over-simplified). Its own data for the regions of the U.K. show that (if anything) this relationship is reversed.
Life expectancy in Scotland is much lower despite having far and away the lowest concentration of anthropogenic PM 2.5 pollutants. Many studies with and between countries show this clearly (e.g. life expectancies by national deprivation deciles, England: 2018 to 2020).
In order to get a handle on how much more significant factors other than PM 2.5 can be, we looked at a recent paper that considers the impact of changes in different factors on life expectancy across 29 European countries (the paper also looks at each factor in isolation using multivariate analysis). The chart below shows the life expectancy impact of a 1% change in the listed factors. There are of course some caveats, but you can immediately see that economic activity dominates the outcomes with a 13-month gain in life expectancy for a 1% gain in GDP versus say a 2.7 month gain for a 1% change in PM 10-2.5. Also note there is no statistically significant relationship between CO2 and life expectancy.
In another section of the same paper the author states: “France and Sweden, some of the countries closest to their potential LE (life expectancies), are also amongst those with the highest NOx level.” The real message, though, is that if you dent people’s income by narrowly pursuing PM 2.5 reduction, you will, on balance, shorten life expectancy and not increase it. The Jacobs’ report confirms that there will be multiple negative impacts on business and economic activity. We guess that on balance Ulez will lower life expectancy when factoring in the impacts on business and family incomes, as well as quality of life considerations.
In the post Covid world, we have understood that politicians of all stripes will shamelessly use emotional manipulation in order to get reasonable people to comply with their unreasonable edicts. That is why understanding how reliable, or otherwise, attributable deaths, life-years saved and life expectancy figures are is so important. You can almost guarantee that these estimates will be manipulated and potentially used to rationalise illogical and damaging policies.With opaque models it is relatively easy to produce results to order.
The political process assumes that the individuals involved are able to understand competing objectives and arrive at a sensible compromise. However, we saw in the case of Covid that many politicians have limited scientific understanding and will tend to pursue unachievable safety, at any cost.
The State seems to be redefining its role with a narrow group of ideologically-driven technocrats setting somewhat arbitrary targets. Achieving those targets requires wholesale changes to people’s lives. Very often economic, mental health and other impacts are barely considered and historically established constitutional boundaries between the State and the citizen are often ignored.
In the case of Ulez expansion, the 59% of respondents to the public consultation who clearly opposed the expansion were simply ignored.
Various sops will no doubt be offered to voters, but is it important that readers realise that there is a direction of travel to these various steps. Finally, remember Albert Camus’s wise warning that, “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”
Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was an early critic of the Imperial Covid model. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition, which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach.
Everything you need to know about Covid’s “Eris” Variant
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | August 7, 2023
The big news the last couple of days is that “Covid” is back… again. This time it’s the “Eris” variant, named after the Greek goddess of strife and discord, it supposedly is causing a spike in cases for the first time in… who cares how long.
The bulk of reporting on it is detailing how it’s supposedly related to Omicron or Arcturus or all the other names they flash in the headlines.
That, or the symptoms.
They are a runny nose and a sore throat and…well, you know. The only noteworthy thing to mention here is that the “loss of taste of smell” – so long sold as Covid’s calling card – is no longer considered a common symptom.
Yahoo even reported – without a shred of irony – that the alleged up-tick in “cases” was due to people spending more time indoors:
Bad weather encouraging people to spend more time indoors and waning immunity have been blamed for the rise
… a peculiar position to take, considering lockdown is meant to have helped, last time.
Anyway, without further ado, here is everything you really need to know about the Eris variant:
It’s bullshit.
Just like all the others.
Nothing else really needs to be said, does it?
Sure the media are setting up softballs for us to hammer over the fence, talking about the “symptoms” and “infection” rate again as if the past three years haven’t rendered all those words meaningless. But we are – or should be – well past that point of arguing against the mainstream.
We know everything we need to know about the symptoms – they are “generally mild” and “flu-like”, because Covid is nothing but re-branded endemic respiratory diseases. We know the death statistics are made up and the tests don’t work except to manufacture cases.
We know all this, even this repeating of it is unnecessary, to be honest.
The only aspect of Eris worth discussing is why it’s in the papers, and even that answer is briefer than usual.
Eris exists because the “Cerberus” heatwave is over, and July was unseasonably cold and damp in the UK. Because Autumn will be setting in soon enough and there are no more major sporting events for Just Stop Oil to disrupt for a while.
In short, Eris is what happens when people refuse to panic about climate change.
In fact, we can probably expect headlines linking Eris to the climate in the next few days.
The trouble with that is, just like climate change, people can only be scared by words for so long. The media repeated “global warming” so much the words lost their meaning, and filled the papers with so many apocalyptic predictions that never came to pass that people got numbed to it, they filter it out now even if they don’t realise they do.
The same will happen with covid; the more they bring it back for a jump scare, the less people will jump.
That’s probably why they’re laying the groundwork “the next pandemic” of “disease X”.
BBC Admits to Smearing Anti-Ulez Protesters as ‘Far Right’
BY IAN PRICE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 4, 2023
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) has responded to complaints about its news coverage of an anti-Ulez protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday, April 15th, 2023. BBC London News broadcast at the time that:
Local protestors and mainstream politicians were joined by conspiracy theorists and Far Right groups.
I was among many people to complain at the time, disgusted at the BBC’s smear. I was at the protest myself, the first of any kind that I had attended. Since my previous exposure to similar protests – such as those against the lockdowns over the course of the pandemic – was limited to watching clips on Twitter, I was slightly anxious. Were things likely to kick off? Were the police going to ‘kettle’ us all in a side street off the Strand?
I could not have been more wrong. I was overwhelmed by how many families were there, abundant small children clambering up the bases of Landseer’s lions. There were a handful of Tory politicians some of whom spoke from the platform, but there was no other political presence whatsoever.
When I saw the BBC London news coverage, I was therefore appalled. I wasn’t too concerned about the claim that there were a few conspiracy theorists there – quite a few placard-holders were plainly ‘Team James’ – but “Far Right groups” seemed to me something for which there was no evidence at all. This appeared to be an attempt on the BBC’s part to suppress dissent towards the Ulez expansion by smearing opponents. This struck me as a sinister turn from the national broadcaster and so I complained.
On April 21st, the BBC responded to my complaint as follows:
BBC London had deployed a reporter to the protest and she witnessed, and documented, first hand, motifs on tabards and placards with explicit Nazi references, along with other epithets about world order and democracy.
I walked around the protest for about three hours on April 15th and I must have missed the explicit Nazi references, presumably displayed by the “Far Right groups”. I complained again, asking for evidence.
On May 12th the BBC rejected my additional complaint as follows:
We remain satisfied our BBC London reporter gave an honest account of what she witnessed that day.
At this point, I escalated the complaint to the ECU, one of 44 people to do so on the grounds of both accuracy and impartiality. Today the BBC acknowledged the following:
In relation to “Far Right groups”, we recognised that the [conspiracy theory] groups named above might have Far Right (or indeed Far Left) adherents, but did not consider this to be evidence of the presence of “Far Right groups”. The programme-makers directed our attention to the deployment by some demonstrators of Nazi imagery, symbolism and slogans directed against the Mayor of London which we accepted was consistent with tactics used predominantly by certain Far Right groups, but we saw no grounds for concluding that they were used exclusively by such groups. We also noted the presence of an individual who seemed, from social media postings, very likely to have been associated with the presence of a Far Right group at a previous demonstration, but the evidence fell short of establishing that he was an adherent of that group, and we saw no evidence that other representatives of the group were present. While it was clear from our dealings with the programme-makers that the statement about the presence of Far Right groups was made in good faith, we assessed the evidence differently. In our judgement it was suggestive of the presence of Far Right groups but fell short of establishing that such groups had in fact been represented among the demonstrators. This aspect of the complaint has been upheld.
This shows pretty clearly that the idea of “Far Right groups” being present at the protest was a complete fiction. Feelings are running high about Khan and some placards quite possibly likened his administrative style to infamous dictators of the past but for anyone to have spun this as evidence of “Far Right groups” is a stretch to say the least. As for the “individual who seemed, from social media postings, very likely to have been associated with the presence of a Far Right group at a previous demonstration”, the words ‘straws’ and ‘clutching’ spring to mind.
In addition to upholding the complaint about accuracy, the BBC has also partially upheld the complaint on impartiality which derives from the close resemblance of the BBC’s language in its news report to that of Khan himself at a People’s Town Hall in Ealing in March. When asked about people’s misgivings about the Ulez expansion, he said that its opponents were “in coalition with the Far Right” and “joining hands with some of those outside who are part of a Far Right group”.
The BBC has now acknowledged the “impression of bias” and upheld this part of the complaint, while spinning it as something of an accident, something that “might well have been perceived as lending a degree of corroboration to the Mayor’s comments”.
While it is a step in the right direction for the BBC to uphold two aspect of the complaints, there remain unanswered questions about its broader coverage of Ulez and to what extent its coverage is being unduly influenced by Sadiq Khan.
Consider the article in the Daily Express published on 24th June about a senior producer at the BBC that made contact with Reform U.K. London Mayoral candidate Howard Cox to blow the whistle on the BBC’s suppression of coverage critical of the Ulez expansion. (Cox, by the way, was also in attendance at the April demo but had not at that point declared as a Mayoral candidate):
The leak to Reform U.K. Mayoral candidate Howard Cox… reveals that Mr. Khan had applied pressure on the BBC over reporting the issue. It said that journalists wanting to run stories now needed top level clearance over something that is set to be a major electoral issue in the London Mayor election and general election both next year.
The Express article went on to explain email exchanges that the senior BBC producer had received:
The BBC producer was told in an email to news staff from Dan Fineman, Senior News Editor BBC South East: “If any platforms are doing a story on Ulez charges in the South and Southeast we now need to do a mandatory referral to Jason Horton or Robert Thomson (re) outstanding complaint with the Mayor of London which is very live at the moment.”
Jason Horton is the BBC’s Director of Production for BBC Local Services and Robert Thomson is Head of the BBC in London and the East. This suggests a level of collusion between very senior staff at the BBC and Sadiq Khan with a direct influence over editorial approaches to news coverage of anti-Ulez protests.
It was also reported by the whistleblower that a BBC London investigation into Ulez was now been paused because of the Mayor of London’s pressure on the BBC.
In short, Khan appears to be exercising at the very least some form of influence over the BBC’s coverage of anti-Ulez protests. This is not an “impression of bias” – this more closely resembles a real, undiluted bias against anti-Ulez campaigners on the part of the nation’s publicly-funded broadcaster at the behest of the Labour Mayor of London. The BBC has come up with a partial and grudging apology but I suspect that the truth about its willingness to suppress dissent with “Far Right” smears is more extensive than it’s prepared to admit. I hope that doesn’t make me a “conspiracy theorist”.
A Round-Up of the BBC’s Climate Howlers of the Past 12 Months
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 6, 2023
The annual Paul Homewood review of the BBC’s climate howlers is always an enjoyable read, even for those keen students who follow his investigative work during the year. But with the consensus starting to crumble for the insane Net Zero collectivist project, this latest instalment of Tall Climate Tales from the BBC seems to have attracted a wider audience. Talk TV and the Daily Express have both given extensive coverage to the latest set of BBC bloopers.
How we laughed when Julia Hartley-Brewer read from the list on her TalkTV morning show. Such as the report from the Norfolk village of Happisburgh where “extreme weather linked to climate change” has eroded the soft sand cliff rock. No mention of the finding of the British Geological Society that it is likely the Norfolk cliffs have been “eroding at the present rate for about the last 5,000 years”.
Or the report that the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season was the third most active on record. Nothing of the sort, of course, with Homewood observing that since 1851 there have been 32 years with a higher count of hurricanes. There was also an evidence-free claim in September 2022 on the BBC Verify that hurricanes were getting more powerful. The U.S. weather service NOAA states in its latest review that “there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity”.
Your own correspondent’s personal favourite made the list with news that bee-eaters had turned up in Norfolk to the delight of local twitchers. But the BBC was worried, reporting that rare ‘rainbow birds’ trying to breed in the UK was a worrying sign of how our climate is changing. It was an “unmissable sign”, no less, that the climate emergency had reached our shores. As any half-knowledgeable bird watcher could have told the BBC, bee-eaters have frequently visited England in the past. One archive alone lists 80 sightings between 1793 and 1957. Then there’s a story about trees in British cities that a study said were at risk of drought due to climate change. There is no evidence that the areas were getting drier, nor is there any evidence they will. “Once again, the BBC is uncritically presenting a controversial study as factual,” commented Homewood.
It is the common practice of the BBC to reproduce the most extreme climate claims without challenge, without providing supporting data, and without reporting on the views of scientists who disagree, writes Homewood. In fact, the practice continues almost daily. In March, the BBC said that Antarctica ocean currents were heading for collapse – “a new report warns”. The article proceeded to go into full Day After Tomorrow mode with “previous research” suggesting a slowdown in the North Atlantic current causing Europe to become colder.
Modern climate science/activism is awash with clickbait predictions looking for a suitable home in useful idiot mainstream media. As recent research from the Clintel Foundation revealed, about 42% of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate impact statements are based on a computer model that assumes temperatures will climb by 5°C in less than 80 years. Even the IPCC itself admits this is of “low likelihood”. About half the published climate papers are thought to use this 5°C input, leading to a festival of misinformation for gainfully employed journalists content to append “scientists say” to fanciful copy. The latest giant of modern science to rain on this parade is last year’s joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics Dr John Clauser, who calls the climate emergency narrative a “dangerous corruption” of science that threatens the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has “metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”, he observes.
The state broadcaster has followed this path of eco-extremism for over 20 years, providing covering fire for politicians to promote a Net Zero project. As audiences continue to decline, the BBC increasingly operates as a club of eco-fanatics intent on signally their virtue to fellow members of the cult. It fails to cover the scientific process at almost every level, discounting the views of any scientists that don’t adhere to the party political line. As with Covid, there seems to be an irrational belief in the output of computer models. Such belief leads to a preposterous acceptance that ‘attribution‘ models can link individual weather events to supposed human involvement.
As we have noted, large areas of science are now closed for debate for fear that any competing views will cast doubt on the unproven but ‘settled’ hypothesis that humans cause all or most climate change. Natural variation in the climate is largely ignored, while stories of once fanatical interest suddenly disappear from the carefully constructed catastrophe playlist. These include polar bears – more than you can shake a stick at these days – the recovery in Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and spectacular coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef.
In Homewood’s view, the BBC’s coverage of climate change and related policy issues such as energy “has long been of serious and widespread concern”. In his latest review, Homewood notes that all of the BBC’s factual errors could easily have been avoided with a bit of basic research. And he asks, who is editing all this “fake reporting”? Where are the highly paid executives who let all this continue? “It is apparent that nothing has changed in the last 12 months,” he says.
One more for the road – another personal favourite of mine. It was dry in February this year, despite an average amount of rainfall over the winter. Banging the drum for drought, the BBC produced a picture of an empty reservoir labelled “water levels in rivers, reservoirs and groundwater levels were abnormally low in February”. Alas, the picture showed trees in full leaf, which wasn’t surprising since it was taken in September 2021, a time when reservoirs can be seasonably low. “There’s nothing like a fake image to fool the public,” comments Homewood.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: Paul Homewood has produced a summary of his latest report about the BBC’s climate howlers for the Express.
Is the Era of ‘Global Boiling’ Really Upon Us? The Climate Fear-Mongers are Becoming a Laughing Stock
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 2, 2023
Increasing numbers of commentators are starting to call peak Net Zero and this process is being helped by the crumbling of the decades-long suffocating stranglehold exerted on ‘settled’ climate science by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The latest body-blow to its credibility has come from last year’s joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Dr John Clauser. He has warned the Nobel Foundation not to model a proposed new body to police ‘misinformation’ on the IPCC, adding: “In my opinion the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.” It would seem unhelpful that at a time when Clauser voiced his criticism, the UN’s Secretary General headed for a public stage and upgraded global warming to “global boiling”.
Of course, by ramping up the fear to ‘boiling’ point, the unhinged Antonio Guterres has fallen into the ‘worse than Hitler’ trap. Where can you go after you call someone a Nazi, or tell a world audience that the Earth is bubbling beneath its feet?
Details have recently been made public about the short speech Clauser gave to young scientists in South Korea. He implored them to follow the scientific method based on good observations and experiments. Good observations always overrule purely speculative theory, he told them. Referring to climate science, he noted the current world was “literally awash, saturated, with pseudoscience, with bad science, with scientific misinformation and disinformation”.
Referring often to climate science, he told his audience that if they are doing good science they must beware since it may take them on paths that lead them into “political incorrect” areas. “If you’re a good scientist, you will follow them… I can confidently say that there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme events,” he said.
Easier said than done of course since most scientists are funded in one form or another by governments. In the area of climate, politicians require scientific backing for their collectivist plans to re-order society around Net Zero. Huge amounts of public money are flowing into untested, unproductive new technologies, few of which would be viable in a free capital market. Green subsidy hunters are making serious fortunes with little risk involved. The climate narrative is absurd, says MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen, but trillions of dollars says it is not absurd.
There are a number of fault lines that run through the IPCC science narrative. It maintains that all changes in the climate since 1900 are caused by humans burning fossil fuel. This is plainly odd since it asks us to ignore almost all natural variation, having accepted that natural causes were responsible for climate change in the past. It also suggests that the current period in the Earth’s history is the hottest for 125,000 years, ignoring copious evidence that temperatures were much higher in the Holocene Thermal Maximum about 9,700 – 5,700 years ago. The IPCC would have us believe that higher levels of carbon dioxide cause the temperature to inevitably rise, despite observational evidence throughout the paleo record that contradicts that simple hypothesis. After 50 years of trying, not a single credible paper has yet been published providing conclusive proof for the anthropogenic global warming boiling hypothesis.
Earlier this year, a group of scientists operating through the Clintel Foundation examined the latest work of the IPCC. The authors were damning about its most recent report, finding it emphasised worst-case scenarios, rewrote climate history and had a huge bias against good news. Its standout revelation was that 42% of the IPCC’s claims were based on climate models fed with the implausible assumption that global temperatures would rise by around 5°C in less than 80 years. Deep in the main body of its work, even the IPCC admits this is of “low likelihood”. Even worse, Clintel noted, was that about half the extreme climate model forecasts found across the entire body of scientific literature are based on this 5°C boost. It is a fair bet that almost 100% of the clickbait scare stories that dominate mainstream media are taken from these sources.
The former IPCC author and economics professor Roger Pielke Jr. thinks that the continuing reliance on these implausible assumptions by the IPCC is “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the 21st Century”.
The tide could well be turning as the voices of previously cancelled giants of science are heard. In the UK, there is increasing media interest in the retrospective uplifts to temperature datasets enabling previous inconvenient pauses to be removed, and ‘records’ to be declared at regular intervals. Not before time, the Met Office’s habit of declaring heat highs amidst the jet exhaust at British airports is becoming something of a national joke.
One of those science giants, atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen, recently told a U.S. government body that climate science “is awash with manipulated data, which provides no reliable scientific evidence”. In his view, the IPCC only issues “government-dictated findings”, noting that the important, and much quoted, “Summary for Policymakers” must be approved for publication by all governments. He further noted that, “misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry-picking or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called global warming caused by fossil fuel and CO2”.
Dr Clauser signed off his inspiring talk to young scientists in South Korea by telling them to observe nature directly so they could determine real truth. “Use the information gained from carefully performed experiments and research to stop the spread of scientific misinformation, disinformation,” he said.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
NATO Instructors Trained Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion Soldiers in 2021
Sputnik – 06.08.2023
NATO military instructors from Denmark and the United Kingdom trained Ukrainian soldiers at a base of the nationalist Azov battalion, despite Azov’s exclusion from US military funding due to its radicalism, according to documents from the Danish embassy in Kiev seen by Sputnik on Sunday.
A note from the Danish embassy dated May 21, 2021, informed the Ukrainian Defense Ministry of the arrival of six instructors for the 56-th Ukrainian army brigade in Berdyansk and Urzuf, where Azov’s main base was located.
“These sites were previously investigated by Russian law enforcement officers, and the materials found there directly point to intensive training of mobilized Ukrainian citizens by Western officers, using criminal methods of warfare, which the Azovs were fluent in,” a law enforcement officer told Sputnik.
The instructors of the UK’s OP ORBITAL training team had already been present in Ukraine before, the document showed.
“Operation ORBITAL is the code name of a UK program to train Ukrainian army servicepeople from the mobilization reserve. I note that these officers, as stated in the text of the document, have access to classified information, which indicates that Ukraine has provided access to information constituting state secrets, including mobilization planning documents,” the officer said.
Despite the fact that the Azov battalion has been recognized by the United States as a neo-Nazi organization, NATO forces were directly involved in training of nationalist armed formations, they noted.
“This is evidence of Kiev’s intensive preparations for active combat operations under NATO’s supervision,” the law enforcement officer concluded.
In August 2022, the Russian Supreme Court designated Azov as a terrorist organization. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office said that Azov militants use prohibited means and methods of warfare and are complicit in the torture of civilians and the killing of children.
Military bloat and empire as a way of life
Recalling William Appleman Williams final work
By Patrick Mazza | The Raven | June 3, 2023
Once again, while other needs are squeezed, a federal budget deal will literally starve the poor to feed the military. While new work requirements are placed on SNAP recipients that will drive some from the food support program, the military budget (never call it defense) remains untouched. The recent debt ceiling deal leaves Joe Biden’s $886 billion 2024 Pentagon budget request intact while domestic programs are slashed. The above graph from the National Priorities Project tells the story.
In real terms it is the largest military budget in U.S. history, the only exceptions being World War II and the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that came after 9-11. Larger by far than during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, or the Reagan military buildup. Again, from the National Priorities Project:
The real military budget is even higher. Adding in nuclear weapons, foreign military aid and “intelligence,” the project puts the current 2023 budget at $920 billion. That is still an undercount. William Hartung, an expert on military spending, calculates that even in fiscal year 2020 the total military expenditure was $1.25 trillion, adding in other costs such as support for veterans and debt service. It’s easily pushing $1.5 trillion by now.
The U.S. by far is the biggest military spender on Earth, with 39% of the total, exceeding the next 10 nations combined, as this chart shows:
Most warlike nation
So why is the military budget so unassailable? Why, no matter how often bloated military spending is denounced, does the budget climb toward ever greater heights? Even after Dwight Eisenhower made the famous warning in his farewell address:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Ike would have known, being one of the progenitors of that complex as the general leading U.S. forces that invaded Europe during D-Day and as the president during the nuclear buildup of much of the early Cold War. One clue as to why his warning went unheeded is in the fact he originally wanted to call it the military-industrial-congressional complex, the “iron triangle” that keeps pumping up military expenditures. As Hartung writes, Congress is bought by the weapons industry. It is a kind of money laundering scheme where increased military spending comes back as campaign donations, a perfect example of the legalized bribery that is the real governing system of the U.S.
But there are deeper reasons, explaining why that “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” for which Ike called has never appeared, at least to the level able to tie back the power of the complex. War and militarism are rooted deep in the U.S. of American experience. As former President Jimmy Carter said, “If you go around the world and ask people which is the most warlike country on Earth, which one do you think they would respond? The United States. Since we left the Second World War, and even before, the United States has constantly been at war in some part of the world. We’ve been in about 30 combats with other countries since the Second World War . . . So I would say that the military-industrial complex, the manufacturers of all kinds of weapons, are very influential in the country and the Congress as well.”
Carter noted that the U.S. hasn’t been at war with someone only 16 years of its 242-year history. (Even that is doubtful since even during Carter’s so-called peaceful years the U.S. was stirring up trouble in Afghanistan in a successful effort to give the Soviets “their own Vietnam,” as his National Security Adviser, Zbignew Brzezinski, has confessed.) The list is extensive. If the U.S. was not fighting with some European or Asian power, it was warring on some native nation or another on the frontier. War has worked for the United States, historian Geoffrey Perrett noted in his 1989 history of major U.S. conflicts, Country Made by War.
“Since 1775 no nation on Earth has had as much experience of war as the United States: nine major wars in nine generations. And in between the wars have come other armed conflicts such as the Philippine insurgency and clashes in the Persian Gulf. America’s wars have been like the rungs on a ladder by which it rose to greatness. No other nation has triumphed so long, so consistently, or on such as vast scale, through force of arms.”
Although conflicts since World War II have not been so successful, nonetheless they failed to dislodge the fundamental U.S triumph in that war, which left it overwhelmingly dominant over all other powers, each of which had been ravaged in the war. As historian Alfred McCoy noted in his recent work, To Govern the Globe, it left the U.S. in the unprecedented position of holding sway on both European and Asian ends of Eurasia. If this hegemony is eroding with the rise of China and other powers, the U.S. still remains in a powerful position.
To all this one must ask the more fundamental question. Why has the U.S. been the most warlike, most continually at war? For the answer we can look to historian William Appleman Williams and the title of his final book which summarized his substantial life work, published in 1980, Empire as a Way of Life. Williams was the dean of what came to be known as the revisionist school of U.S. history that penetrated the myth of American exceptionalism with the facts of history, that the U.S. was an empire from its colonial roots, and behaved much as any other empire.
First let Williams define his terms. “. . . a way of life is the combination of patterns of thought and action that, as it becomes habitual and institutionalized, defines the thrust and character of a culture and society.” Then, empire, a system in which, “The will, and power, of one element asserts its superiority.” In some cases empire “concerns the forcible subjugation of formerly independent people by a wholly external power.” Such as native peoples or those who lived in the former northern half of Mexico.
Williams does not let the mass of U.S. of Americans off. We are enmeshed in the ways of empire.
“Empire became so intrinsically our American way of life that we rationalized and suppressed the nature of our means in the euphoria of the enjoyment of the ends . . . It is perhaps a bit too extreme, but only by a whisker, to say that imperialism has been the opiate of the American people.”
The U.S. was “born and bred” of another empire, the British. “The 19th– and 20th-century empire known as the United States of America began as a gleam in the eyes of various 16th century critics of, and advisers to, Elizabeth I,” Williams explains. At that time, “England was then a backward and underdeveloped small island” outclassed by other powers emerging in the Atlantic fringe, Portugal, Spain, France and The Netherlands, who were already commencing the age of European world conquest.
England concluded that “domestic welfare and social peace required vigorous imperial expansion,” and began first by consolidating the internal empire on the British Isles in Scotland and Ireland, and then in the 1600s expanding to the North American coast. “. . . the most significant aspect of the empire was the success in transforming the American colonies from tiny, insecure outposts into dynamic societies generating their own progress . . . It produced another culture based on the proposition that expansion was the key to freedom, prosperity, and social peace.”
Inevitably, tensions rose between the ruling class of the home isles and the rising elites of the colonies. Benjamin Franklin believed the weight of development would eventually move the center of the British Empire to North America (which it finally did in 1945, but that comes later in the story), and until nearly the time of the split recommended that course. “But the British feared that such a policy would lead to the loss of control and profits, and Americans increasingly asserted their own claims to their own empire,” Williams writes.
That culminated in the Revolutionary War and the successful creation of the United States. But a weak central government seemed unable to fully press forward what George Washington would call “a rising empire” – the founders were not shy about using that kind of language. It appeared the union would fray into two or more nations, while uprisings such as Shay’s Rebellion threatened to shatter social peace. So the new national elites came together to create a framework to ensure continued expansion under a strong central government, the Constitution. Writes Williams, “. . . the Constitution was an instrument of imperial government at home and abroad.”
The Constitution was founded on a clever turnaround of a fundamental political understanding architected by one of its key authors, James Madison. The general belief to that point had been exposited by French political philosopher Montesquieu “that liberty could only exist in a small state. Madison boldly argued the opposite: that empire was essential for freedom.” Madison needed to make that argument because many citizens of the new nation, burned by their experience with Britain, wanted nothing to do with a strong central government.
Madison made his case in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. “This form of government, in order to effect its purpose, must operate not within a small but extensive sphere . . . Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all to feel it . . . to act in unison with each other.”
Williams writes, “He was arguing that surplus social space and surplus resources were necessary to maintain economic welfare, social stability, freedom and representative government.” A strong central government would be needed to expand land for agriculture, to expand and protect exports, and to promote manufacturing.
With the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark Expedition to the Pacific, Jefferson fully embraced Madison’s understanding. “I am persuaded that no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government,” he said as he left the presidency. “Jeffersonian Democracy, as it came to be called, was a creature of imperial expansion,” Williams writes. “He, perhaps even more than Madison, established it as a way of life, and most Americans embraced it because it gave them personal and social rewards.”
So much for the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”
“. . . once people begin to acquire and enjoy and take for granted and waste surplus resources and space as a routine part of their lives,” Williams writes, “and to view them as a sign of God’s favor, then it requires a genius to make a career – let alone a culture – on the basis of agreeing upon limits. Especially when several continents lie largely naked off your shores.”
The myth of empty continents and the racism it embodies has always been part of the story. “Racism . . . began and survived as a psychologically justifying and economically profitable fairy tale. It provided the gloss for the harsh truth that empire . . . is the child of an inability or unwillingness to live within one’s own means. Empire as a way of life is predicated upon having more than one needs.”
Next: Coming installments will review how imperial expansionism is rooted in a misguided sense of mission and compulsive drive for security, and how empire as a way of life continued to unfold after the era of the founders.
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Remembering Fallujah: The War Crimes Committed under Command of Jim Molan and Jim Mattis
Defending Australian Values in Iraq
By David Macilwain | American Herald tribune | February 8, 2018
Ross Caputi, a former Marine who was “witness and accomplice to the atrocities” committed in Fallujah in November 2004 during “Operation Phantom Fury”, wrote this about his unit’s entry into the city:
Perhaps it was just too painful of a realization for many of us to make, because we saw ourselves as the liberators, the good guys, and to admit that we were hurting innocent people would have contradicted everything that we claimed to stand for. I can only speculate about what the motives were for the people who dreamed up that mission and decided to make the people of Fallujah flee into the desert. Was it also too painful for the decision makers to admit to themselves that we were hurting innocent people? Or were they so evil that they just did not care who we were hurting? Whatever their reasons for doing it were, the fact of the matter is that our entire command was aware that we had forced the majority of the city’s population, about 200,000 people, into refugee status, but nobody took responsibility for their wellbeing, as international law required of us.
Central to that command was Major General Andrew “Jim” Molan, an Australian who was seconded to the US military in 2004 and took overall command of US coalition forces in Iraq, alongside the current US defence secretary Jim Mattis.
What happened in the so-called “second battle of Falluja” however, went far beyond a failure to attend to the needs of the civilian population who were able to flee the city before the US assault. Those who remained found themselves imprisoned in a “free-fire zone” for 10,500 US troops and 850 UK special forces, along with 2000 Iraqis loyal to the Occupation government in Baghdad.
While the “Battle for Falluja” has been glorified and celebrated as the most destructive and significant US battle since Vietnam, intended to be a final stand against insurgents who had become concentrated there, it has also been recognised as one of the worst war crimes committed by US coalition forces during the whole occupation of Iraq. … continue
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