Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Inside Climate News thinks the mounting death toll from Covid-19 will push climate skeptics to embrace blind faith in experts. But they completely ignore that many climate skeptics are deeply worried about Covid-19, and have been from the start.
Decades of Science Denial Related to Climate Change Has Led to Denial of the Coronavirus Pandemic
After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science, it’s easy to see how epidemiology came next.
BY NEELA BANERJEE
BY DAVID HASEMYERAmerican science denialism, deployed for years against climate change and, most recently, the coronavirus, can be traced back to the early 1950s during the fight over smog in Los Angeles.
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Decades of climate denial now appear to have paved the way for denial of Covid-19 by many on the right, according to experts on climate politics. After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking climate scientists and accentuating the supposed uncertainty of climate science, it isn’t hard to understand how that happened.
President Trump, who denies climate change, has brushed off Covid-19’s seriousness until recently by relying on many of the same arguments he uses to dismiss global warming, such as ignoring government scientists or blaming China.
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Will Covid-19 Deaths Lead Skeptics to Rethink Views on Climate Change?
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Conservatives have also been encouraged to doubt the objectivity of scientists, Taylor said. Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change.
In 2009, thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists were leaked, in a scandal known as Climategate. Climate deniers seized upon excerpts from the emails to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about global warming before international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Multiple reviews of the scientists’ emails exonerated them of tampering with data, but to deniers, Climategate remains proof of the dishonesty of climate researchers.
“There’s a hostility toward the messengers,” Taylor said. “Technocratic elites and scientists are for the most part Democrats, and that’s one thing the Republican base knows really well. They’re not trustworthy. They’re not part of the tribe. And Republicans have been hearing for 30 years that they have an agenda they want to advance.”
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As the death toll from the pandemic climbs, conservatives are likely to set aside their continued skepticism of science, including the facts underpinning climate change, Taylor said. “The distrust of expertise and the medical profession will wither away,” he said, “because we’ll see the consequences of that distrust.”
But Goldman is less optimistic that the impact of Covid-19 can lead doubters to reconsider anything other than Covid-19.
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Read more: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08042020/science-denial-coronavirus-covid-climate-change
Nullius in verba – Take nobody’s word for it. This is the ancient motto of the Royal Society, a science organisation which was founded in 1660.
Granted much of the Royal Society in my opinion no longer lives up to that motto, but there is no reason we shouldn’t. The blind acceptance of “experts” advocated by Inside Climate News is a religious belief system, not science. Experts frequently get things wrong. Sometimes entire professions get things wrong, for extended periods. History is full of groups of experts who blindly rejected the evidence they had made a mistake.
Consider the alleged expert advice from the WHO. If President Trump had blindly accepted the bad advice of WHO experts, who were still arguing against travel bans in late February, Trump would not have imposed a travel ban on China in January, against expert advice, and the situation in the USA would likely have been much worse than it currently is. The WHO refused to release the names of the “expert” doctors who vetoed a motion to declare a pandemic in January.
Trump’s rival Joe Biden at the time described the January Chinese travel ban as “xenophobia” and “hysteria”, not supported by the advice of experts. Even CNN says that Biden later flipped on supporting the travel ban.
What about the other claim Inside Climate News made, that skeptics’ blind distrust in experts is leading us to reject evidence that Coronavirus is a problem?
For starters, the most damaging rejection of evidence to date in the Coronavirus saga had nothing to do with Conservatives. The corrupt socialists who run China imprisoned and disappeared entire teams of doctors who tried to warn people. Worse the Chinese programme of disappearances is ongoing; According to The Times of Israel, Dr. Ai Fen recently disappeared after publishing a story “The one who supplied the whistle” in China’s People Magazine in March. Many of Dr. Ai Fen’s colleagues including the famous Dr. Li Wenliang have also disappeared or died.
But socialists like the CCP frequently get a free pass from greens when they shoot the messenger, in this case maybe literally.
What about the alleged climate skeptic rejection of the evidence? It is true there are disagreements amongst climate skeptics about the appropriate response to Coronavirus. But readers might remember WUWT raised the alarm about Coronavirus in January, in a post titled China Corona Virus Horror: Hospital Corridor of the Dead and Dying. I don’t think anyone could reasonably describe the WUWT January post as evidence of blanket climate skeptic rejection of the threat posed by the Chinese Coronavirus.
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There seem to be experts with differing opinions in the field of epidemiology which makes me think it’s a healthy science.
The totalitarian loathing of experts with differing opinions in the field of ‘climate science’ marks it out as politically motivated pseudoscience….
Sixty years ago CV19 would have been another Flu pandemic. The experts advocating the extreme measures will claim they were right, especially if the death toll is not far off a top end Excess Winter Deaths rate. Apart from wrecking, or setting back most Western economies by 10 years it won’t have achieved that much, in the UK the NHS wasn’t overwhelmed and now has the right number of ventilators for next winter’s Flu, but no herd immunity, when the 2nd wave arrives.
“Will Covid-19 Deaths Make Climate Skeptics Rethink their Distrust of Experts?”
Easiest question with the surest answer I have heard in weeks.
Answer: No.
There are no experts to trust or distrust.
We know who they are referring to when they say “Experts”.
As regards experts in Covid 19, perhaps the problem is that we are listening too much to them. Epidemiologists will of course know how how best to contain the virus – and will advise politicians accordingly. Draconian, economically destructive lock-downs followed. But only Sweden asked the right question, namely “What is the most sensible way to deal with this virus?” Their answer was quite different from lock-downs.
Their approach may cause more deaths – but only deaths that would have happened within a couple of years anyway. In Sweden will we see a spike in normal death statistics this year – followed by a marked drop over the following two years.
And won’t that make more sense??
“Epidemiologists will of course know how how best to contain the virus”
A bizarre assertion. How the hell would they how anything about a virus for which we have no data, and which is in NO WAY a “reboot” of the SARS?
You have to be THINKING before you can REthink.
Distrust of climate experts? It would have helped if a lot of them hadn’t been demonstrable liars.
Shi Zhengli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli
“She is a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Shi and her colleague Cui Jie found that the SARS virus originated in bats”
“In 2014, Shi Zhengli was involved in an investigation of bat coronaviruses, specifically gain of function experiments involving both the SARS and bat coronaviruses, a joint research of University of North Carolina and Wuhan Institute of Virology, with Ralph S. Baric as principal investigator.[9] That same year funding for the project in the US had been paused[10] due to the moratorium on risky virology studies with influenza, MERS & SARS viruses, announced by the US government that year”
The documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bXWGxhd7ic
The Epoch Times
ABSTRACT
The beginning of 2020 brought us information about the novel coronavirus emerging in China. Rapid research resulted in the characterization of the pathogen, which appeared to be a member of the SARS-like cluster, commonly seen in bats. Despite the global and local efforts, the virus escaped the healthcare measures and rapidly spread in China and later globally, officially causing a pandemic and global crisis in March 2020. At present, different scenarios are being written to contain the virus, but the development of novel anticoronavirals for all highly pathogenic coronaviruses remains the major challenge. Here, we describe the antiviral activity of previously developed by us HTCC compound (N-(2-hydroxypropyl)-3-trimethylammonium chitosan chloride), which may be used as potential inhibitor of currently circulating highly pathogenic coronaviruses – SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.29.014183v1?fbclid=IwAR12q0EkY2tyBv1WY5TWn5Trh92WJhCEvriR1e3ku1Qn4VeGLN08aXF-6VE
If these are top reporters, the end is nigh indeed.
“…Conservatives have also been encouraged to doubt the objectivity of scientists, Taylor said. Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change…”
If the Inside Climate News people are naïve and foolish enough to believe that science (and climate science in particular) is forever and always infallible, incorruptible and unquestionable, then (as I always say) I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I will sell them at a good price. The realm of science is just as susceptible to the corruption of activism and the money and politics that go with it as any other realm of human knowledge.
The alarmists don’t just try to sell the climate alarmist narrative itself to us, they also try to sell us the integrity of climate science to make the narrative believable. Climate science right now (IMHO) has nearly the same level of integrity as ENRON did when the latter collapsed. “Experts” are only experts until someone shows us that they are wrong, and science is the belief in the ignorance of them.
If Inside Climate News is ignorant and foolish enough to believe that climate science is not corruptible by money and by political and eco-activism, the influence of them and their ilk at the UN and in govts around the world can only do great harm rather than any good. Their ability in influence and ally themselves with politicians at all levels of govt needs to be fought, and it must be fought with the enlightenment of people to the serious scientific problems with the climate scare narrative and wind and solar energy. Until that is done on a large level, the alarmists and eco-activists will continue to be a serious problem for our attempts to advance and improve the human condition–especially in the Third World.
“The realm of science is just as susceptible to the corruption of activism and the money and politics that go with it as any other realm of human knowledge.”
People who wanted and want “to make a difference” flooded into sociology and psychology and other social sciences once their potential as levers on public opinion and public policy became apparent. This has happened with climate science too. Its recruits have included a disproportionate percentage of would-be world-savers.
Gosh, I misread the title. I thought it was “Will to failure of the Covid-19 models open the eyes of the global warming acolytes?”
Obvious answer is no, facts only change beliefs based upon facts.
“Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” – Richard P. Feynman, Manhattan Project scientist
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”
I think that’s my favorite saying of all of them.
“Climate Science is the belief in the expertise of the ignoramus”
From the article: “Decades of Science Denial Related to Climate Change”
Oh, Please! This is outrageous.
There is no evidence for [Human-Caused] climate change. That is undeniable.
Just because this lack of evidence for [Human-Caused] climate change has been in effect for decades doesn’t make a lack of facts any less important. If there is no evidence for decades, there’s no evidence for decades. Making this out to be some kind of personal failing on the part of people who see it this way, is ridiculous. No evidence, is no evidence. It doesn’t matter how long that has been in effect.
You want to change it? Give us some evidence. Just one little bit of evidence would be enough to change a skeptic to a believer. That’s the alarmists’ problem, they don’t have this one little bit of evidence to present. And they know it. That’s why I can say this over and over again, and all we get back from the alarmists is “crickets”. It’s because they have no answer. That ought to tell the undecideds out there something.
30 years, its not climate progress, it’s climate evolution, perturbations, really. It’s over, they will have to dream of another racket to force redistributive change.
‘skeptics’ blind distrust in experts’
It’s actually hard-learned distrust.
The fraudulent Wuhan virus extrapolations pulled out of, what, thin air? someone’s butt? have made me even MORE skeptical of so-called “global warming.
The Article from ‘Inside Climate News’ is totally misleading. The Climategate affair wasn’t about casting doubt on the ‘consensus’ about global warming among scientists (note that the article assumes that there is a consensus). It was about exposing Michael E. Mann’s outrageous fraud with his ‘Hockey Stick’. At the same time many other scientists were exposed for cherry-picking data in order to try & show that the current global warming is ‘unprecedented & therefore anthropogenic. Hundreds of Scientists have condemned Michael E. Mann’s work & he has not been exonerated, unfortunately, however he only got a slap on the wrist because Big Climate was terrified that the affair would destroy its credibility. The author of the article is badly informed.
Models are just a set of assumptions. You see what comes out of computer program when the assumptions are coded up. If the assumptions are questionable then the output is questionable.
You can get around this if you can run an experiment thousands of times and check experiment results against model output. But because we don’t have multiple worlds to experiment on this verifying method doesn’t work.
We just don’t know enough about virus, namely the number infected and the number of early cases to come up with reasonable assumptions.
On the contrary. The “experts” have so blown this one that it’ll make me look for whole new areas in which to refuse to trust experts.
We should have just gone on earning our living as Sweden has done. The shutdown has already caused Depression-level unemployment, some of which will last years because so many small businesses have been destroyed — and has caused so much food to be wasted that there may be starvation in the US by next winter. All because media people told us to panic over a flu and the sheeple did.
Remember, panics are the health of the media. They are not there to help you. Neither are politicians.
The same whinny annoying doctors who ordered stopping the Western economy are those who push for vaccination of children against the flu!!!
“Kids are under the mercy of their parents. It’s heartbreaking to hear that a 4-year-old boy died from the flu after his anti-vaxxer parents refused to give him a flu vaccine. Though it’s controversial whether Tamiflu is effective, it’s sure better than potatoes and elderberries.”
https://twitter.com/eugenegu/status/1225581651280838656
Also note that the “MD” guy admits that there no evidence Tamiflu works, but gives it anyway. But when Trump suggested an unproven protocol (Raoult’s) might work, it was a national scandal.
Dr Marc Girard, a French expert, suggests that Tamiflu is so dangerous, his maker should remove it from market:
http://www.rolandsimion.org/spip.php?article100&lang=fr
Also note that “Eugene Gu, MD” was a plaintiff in the silly Knight First Amendment Institute case against President Trump for blocking people on Twitter:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/11/twitter-lawsuit-donald-trump-blocking-knight-institute
However, none of these clowns will defend the right to defend yourself on social media when you are denigrated by that social media, the denigration being: being banned on social media.
While not a health expert or a scientist, Laurence Tribe is widely regarded as an intellectual; go see https://twitter.com/tribelaw for yourself. See the inanity of the guy. On each and every subject. He couldn’t even understand why Kung Flu death rate was so low in the US compared to other countries (hint: Trump talking about doing more tests was not a “fake news”). That’s how un-intellectual the guy is. Pathetic.