The recent and concerning collapse of the once revered scientific process in large parts of the climate change and medical community is detailed in a highly critical ‘open review’ paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Someday, charge the authors, there will need to be an inquiry into how so many scientific bodies abandoned core principles of scientific integrity, took strong positions on unsettled science, took people’s word for things uncritically, and silenced those who tried to continue the scientific endeavour.
Universities have abandoned their historical role of open and disinterested enquiry on behalf of humanity, and “should be sanctioned for this by revoking their charitable status”. Group-think that maintains prevailing fads and supresses dissent on behalf of alleged ‘consensus’ is the opposite of the central purpose of universities. Mainstream media have long been uncritical receptacles for alarmist ‘clickbait’ political scare stories, and this, it might be added, encourages self-promotion among aggressive publicity-hungry scientists. There are many errors and deceptions and much censorship, state the authors, blighting the complete story being told in an unbiased manner. Singling out the behaviour of state broadcaster the BBC, they note: “Any reasonable observer will wonder whether Ofcom [the state regulator] is asleep at the wheel, not requiring the BBC to correct the errors it has been made aware of by experts, nor return to some form of neutrality.”
The report is mainly written by Professor Michael Kelly, the former Prince Philip Professor of Engineering, Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, and Clive Hambler, Science Lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford. There is also economic input from Professor Roger Koppl from Syracuse University. The full GWPF report is due to be published in December and the paper is currently open for review, comments and contributions from other academics. The GWPF notes habitual attacks on its work from activists, and its ‘open review’ policy is explained here.
The realisation that genuine free speech and scientific enquiry is being replaced by strict politicised requirements to adhere to orthodoxy and pre-set narratives grows with every appalling ‘climategate’-style scandal. Regular readers will need little reminding of the recent retraction of the Alimonti et al. paper by Springer Nature following a year-long campaign by a small group of activist scientists and journalists. The paper, whose lead author was Professor of Physics Gianluca Alimonti, reviewed past weather trends and found no data to support the politically-termed ‘climate emergency’. World headlines have also been devoted to the astonishing story of Dr. Patrick Brown of Johns Hopkins University, who blew the whistle on his recent paper published in Nature on California wildfires. He said he wrote it according to the approved script boosting the role of ‘climate change’ and downplaying any natural causes and the horrendous role played by arsonists.
The full publication of the GWPF paper will add to the growing concern and alarm about the science advice given to governments and the media for onward distribution to the public. The corruptions involved in this process are seemingly built into the current system. Trillions of dollars now back the Net Zero collectivisation project across the world, and most scientists, largely paid for by politicians and wealthy green elites, are fully onboard the gravy train.
The GWPF authors aim to push back by maximising the diversity of advice, challenging advice through opposing ‘red’ teams, ensuring a reasonable level of accountability for scientists to discourage hype, and protecting scientists from career damage if they rationally disagree with mainstream views. Institutions should not take official positions on scientific issues, “since this stifles diversity of thought, freedom of speech and the reliability of advice”. Scepticism must be recovered as a respectful term for scientific behaviour from its present position as an insult, “and reinstated as a core duty of universities and learned societies”, demand the authors.
The authors are particularly dismissive of the role of computer models in the recent Covid pandemic and the promotion of climate change alarm. In the U.K., the “gross misuse” of Covid computer models in the absence of robust data to measure them against is noted. Along with a “paucity of challenge” to scientific advice, this may have contributed to “death tolls, economic decline and societal ills”.
On the climate side, the models have produced temperature forecasts two to three times higher than the actual data eventually showed. What is worse is that the results are getting more inaccurate. If the models were actually modelling the evolving climate, the gap would be narrowing. The inaccuracy is a “major embarrassment” and would not be tolerated in any other field of science, and certainly not in engineering. Separation of human-induced warming from natural temperature variation is far more difficult than that portrayed by the UN-funded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC), since experimentation and replication is “simply not possible”. The inability to model significant parts of the atmosphere are “fatal flaws” in any system that is supposed to be predicting future climate change.
Yet, as regular readers will again recall, computer models play a vital part in promoting the unhinged Thermogeddon fantasies of people like the UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘global boiling’ Guterres. The UN-backed IPCC seems addicted to using computer models incorporating a ‘pathway’ of 5°C global warming within less than 80 years. Over 40% of its impact predictions are based on this forecast, despite an admission it is of “low likelihood”. According to a recent Clintel report, over 50% of clickbait climate science papers incorporate this pathway in a seemingly desperate attempt to attract the attention of activists writing in the mainstream media.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
Brilliant piece. Enjoyed reading.
Me too. When will the media pick it up? Never, I would suggest.
Junk science is but one symptom of a system that is rotting. Morality and culture seem to be in decline, as well. If I were to hazard a guess as to the underlying cause of this train wreck, I would point to the debasement of money by central bankers that has enabled a concurrent rise in the power of government.
It’s rotting for the same reason all our teeth are rotting = sugar
= same reason our bodies are rotting with cancer = sugar (sugar-induced free radicals allied to Vitamin C deficiency)
(cancer also coming from eating of vegetable oils)
= same reason our bodies are rotting through lack of exercise (eating sugar makes us sleepy/depressed/lazy)
…. made much worse through a lack of Vitamin D as ‘exercise’ is usually an ‘outdoor pursuit’
= same reason our minds are rotting = Child and Adult Dementias (a sugar based diet contains no Vitamin B)
= because of alcohol (massively exacerbates he effects of sugar)
All those things are self-reinforcing – we are on a true death spiral
Made infinitely worse in that the very thing that would break/reverse that spiral (saturated fat) is now so widely despised/ridiculed
While all the afflictions, the ‘Modern Diseases’ are hugely exaggerated by the now near complete disappearance (in the sugar-based food we eat) of the trace elements and micro-nutrients that would protect us.
(you know me, you know why)
We really are starving to death here but because nearly everybody is in the same boat – nobody really notices. ##
We actually are adapting to our own extinction.
And in doing so, accelerating its time of arrival – everything suggested as remedy for Climate Change will only make it actually happen
Yes, deserts do have different climates from rainforests BUT, the position/alignments/patterns of stars in the sky did not cause that to be the case.
## Somebody noticed = what stirred me up here was/is recent news that D. Trump has challenged a plethora of our ‘elders/better/worthies’ to a mental and physical acuity test – against him – notably J. Biden = presently heading into a corruption lawsuit thanks to his muppet son.
Everyone here knows that science can be bought and paid for. Everyone here knows that orthodoxy can be harshly imposed. Sadly, climate science is not the only example.
Before climate science there was a very successful campaign to blame dietary fat for the harms caused by sugar. link link
The nutrition science equivalent of Michel Mann, is arguably Ancel Keys. There’s lots of evidence that he and his ilk are responsible for the obesity epidemic and millions of premature deaths.
Dr. Norman Doidge has written Needlepoints about vaccine hesitancy. He points out that people who haven’t been brainwashed by a university education notice that they have been lied to and betrayed by experts, big companies, and big government.
Institutional science is corrupt and unreliable. The consequences are serious.
It would be nice if someone could find a way to fix the problem that didn’t involve throwing the baby out with the bath water. 🙁
Bad as Mann is, IMO he’s nowhere close to Keys, who has caused untold death and suffering with his bogus “study”.
You nailed it in second sentence, but then backed off in third. Policies are downstream; culture, including morality, are upstream. The abandonment of western values is playing out as Tocqueville expected and the Founding Fathers warned. The greatness of the West—free minds and free markets operating in free societies—required and requires a stabilizing and binding ‘force’ that inculcates shared purpose and mutual benefit. That ‘force’? Judeo-Christian worldview. It’s very simple to articulate and prove through cohort studies; it’s also unpopular — especially among those who are what can only be called ‘scientistic’ and/or ‘progressive’.
I agree with your points, but the question remains what toppled the J-C worldview or moral force? Tom A, below, points toward the rise of the ‘Radical Left’, which is true, but again it’s a symptom. My point is that modern central banking, aka, fractional reserve banking, enables whoever controls it, i.e., the State, to consume without producing.
I agree, Frank, that the Fed has some negative attributes, the consequences of which are deleterious. Some of this is structural, and somewhat offset by positive attributes.
But a lot of it is bad, misguided, or politicized decision making. This stuff, in the main, is avoidable. This stuff is driven by the defenestration of J-C values. In other words, what you bemoan about the Fed is, in large measure, a symptom as well.
But your question yet remains: Why has the West turned away from the very stuff that made it great? One could make a good case for the obvious spiritual rationale. There’s also the Hegelian, structural logic. And, there’s the really simple one: People might be rationale, but they certainly lack complete information. So, lots of suboptimal decisions taken over decades tends towards decay. As Achebe wrote a lifetime ago: Things fall apart.
Again, all good points. But there is nothing new about bad or immoral people seeking power to rule the lives of others. What enabled our Constitution-limited Federal government to become the dominant State we see today? What allowed this ‘State’ to co-opt the efforts of so many others, e.g., the press, the media, intellectuals, etc. and to suppress the views of any who might oppose it?
This all takes a lot of resources, i.e., money, in quantities that no moral, i.e., limited, government could possibly acquire through direct taxation or borrowing. One possibility, of course, is the Weimar or Zimbabwe route, but even the ‘rubes’ saw through these schemes fairly quickly.
The preferred and somewhat more stable scheme, then, is to allow a fractional reserve banking (FRB) system under the regulatory auspices of a State owned or controlled Central Bank. This allows the State to borrow nearly unlimited quantities of money to expand its role while allowing the banks to earn on the resulting debt. The end result is that the State and its enablers are rewarded, while the larger population pays the currently not so well hidden tax of monetary inflation.
So yes, ‘[p]eople might be rationale, but they certainly lack complete information.’ And the information they’re missing, or more accurately has been suppressed, is the role of FRB in the our moral decline.
Eliminate fractional reserve banking and banks stop lending.
Without talking about the problem that will cause, you also have to deal with the fact that banks will have to find some way to cover the income that lending used to provide.
The only possible source is by vastly increasing banking fees.
We will be forced to return to a world where most people keep their money in their mattresses.
Except that some governments and banks are keen to move money completely online. Money in the mattress won’t work if it’s no longer accepted as legal tender.
‘Eliminate fractional reserve banking and banks stop lending.’
No. Eliminate FRB and the money supply stops getting jerked around. Any amount of money can accommodate any level of economic activity through adjustments in prices. Production, population and prosperity increased greatly during the second half of the 19th century until WWI, while prices gently declined. I’m quite certain that banks were lending during this period.
‘[B]anks will have to find some way to cover the income that lending used to provide.’
Deposit (safekeeping of money) and credit (lending of money) transactions are both soundly based in property rights and are valid operations for a working banking system within which the banks are compensated according to market principles.
Creating deposits (money) out of thin air and lending these to others, or buying government debt, is called counterfeiting. We can quibble about the morality of all this, but at the very least it’s an inherently unstable system and can only be prevented from collapsing by the coercive efforts of a government owned or controlled central bank.
‘The only possible source is by vastly increasing banking fees.’
In a non-FRB system, instead of getting a pittance or a toaster for your deposits, you could actually lend them out at a market rate of interest if you so choose. The bank, as intermediary, would earn a competitive fee. Of course, once lent out, you wouldn’t be able to write checks on the same money you lent, but hey, by the same token, you wouldn’t be wondering why prices are always going up.
‘We will be forced to return to a world where most people keep their money in their mattresses.’
Well, you can if you want to, but most folks will find safer or more renumerative outlets. Even today, to the extent that people have wealth beyond what they need in the relative short term, it’s invested in real estate, businesses or other financial assets, not in banks.
But on the flip side, far too many people have very little in the way of money or assets, and I believe a lot of them are the victims of crummy big government policies that could only have been enabled by the coerced existence of FRB.
You quote my post, but then time and time again give an answer that has nothing to do with what you quoted.
Eliminate FRB and the money supply stops getting jerked around
The money supply is not getting jerked around.
Any amount of money can accommodate any level of economic activity through adjustments in prices.
Now you want government to set prices.
I’m quite certain that banks were lending during this period.
They were, because there was fractional reserve banking. Banks have always had fractional reserve banking, going back to the first banks, hundreds of years ago.
Deposit (safekeeping of money) and credit (lending of money) transactions are both soundly based in property rights and are valid operations for a working banking system within which the banks are compensated according to market principles.
Without fractional reserve banking, there is no money for banks to lend.
Mark, a few comments:
‘The money supply is not getting jerked around.’
You must be kidding. See here:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
‘Now you want government to set prices.’
No. Prices should be set in a free market. I want the government controlled banking cartel that is enabled by the Federal Reserve to stop ‘printing’ money.
‘Banks have always had fractional reserve banking, going back to the first banks, hundreds of years ago.’
You are correct that FRB goes back a long ways in history. People originally deposited commodity money and received paper receipts that they could substitute for money. It did not take long for ‘banks’ to realize they could profit from issuing (i.e., lending) additional receipts. But they had to be very careful – too much issuance and the depositors would panic and withdraw their money, thereby causing the bank to collapse.
I won’t go into how the banks ‘fixed’ this problem by obtaining monopolies on the issuance of notes from sovereigns in return for agreeing to purchase the sovereign’s debt, since I assume you already know this. The point is that ‘cartelization’ simply allowed the banking system to greatly extend the limits of note issuance, such that an isolated local problem could become a systematic national problem.
There are, therefore, two problems with FRB: One, is that it’s inflationary, so it creates artificial economic booms, which have to be reined in from time to time in the form of a banking system wide panic, recession, depression, etc. before the inflationary effect on prices spirals out to control. And two, by purchasing government debt, it enables the expansion of government well beyond what a free people would put up with in the form of taxation and crowds out private sector investment.
To be fair there is an ongoing debate re. FRB among some free market economists: One side says it should be banned because it’s fraudulent, the other that the market itself should decide how much FRB the banks should engage in. However, both sides in this debate are adamant that the government should play no role in this, for the two reasons stated above.
Finally, I think you’re very much a ‘thinker’, who, like me, is highly skeptical of climate alarmism, as well as a lot of the other intrusions big government, aka, the Left, is making into our personal lives. I hope you’ll keep in mind that many of these intrusions are only made possible by government control of money, most recently by the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 under Woodrow Wilson.
“Junk science is but one symptom of a system that is rotting. Morality and culture seem to be in decline, as well. If I were to hazard a guess as to the underlying cause of this train wreck”
The Radical Left is on the march all over the world.
The Radical Left destroys the societies they live in, so they can make it over into a Radical Left Paradise.
That’s what you are seeing now. The Radical Left marching through our instituions and taking them over, including separating children from their parents and then indoctrinating the children.
Western Society is being attacked from all directions by the Radical Left. They have the money and the Media and they feel like they are on a roll. And they very well may be. If people don’t vote properly, meaning not voting for Radical Leftists, then all may be lost in a short time.
Are people in Democracies smart enough to vote in their own interests under such circumstances? We’re about to find out in the near future.
While the political Left has gone climate crazy, the party of law-and-order has it’s leading candidate under multiple indictments. Pick your poison!
Salute!
True, scvc…..
However, I am looking for a criminal charge like embezzlement, fraud, kickbacks, bribes, and so forth versus “political” concerns about who won the election and the millions of “mail” ballots to folks that never voted before or since.
As the KGB dude said, “give me the name, and I will find you the crime”.
I simply want to see “the science” support what is happening with the climate and look back more than a few years for data. Oh well, maybe we have a Galileo who is willing to be crucified in order to make a big case for the world’s science community
Gums sends…
Trump’s approval rating went higher by about five points yesterday. That puts him at about 63 percent approval rating among Republicans. Desantis is in second place with 12 percent, having lost several points over the last few days.
Trump is going to be the Republican nominee.
And now, prominent Democrats (Washington Post editorial) are calling for Joe Biden to resign (because of mental problems, not corruption) and they are calling for Kamala to resign, too!
Well, if the Democrats want to save themselves, they need to get Biden and Kamala out of the way so some other Democrats can come in and compete for the Democrat presidential nomination.
Trump is going to beat whoever they put in front of him.
Hopefully. But watch out for Gavin (CA governor, not the head of GISS). By all accounts, he’s much slicker than Clinton.
Yes, Gavin is definitely a clone of Clinton. He has the gift of gab. He lies and distorts easily, just like the Clintons (I want to include Hillary as being a good liar and distorter). But Gavin’s record in California is so bad, I don’t think he will be a candidate capable of beating Trump, who has a proven, good record in the most important subjects.
I can hear the anti-Gavin campaign slogan now: Gavin Newsom wants to turn the United States into California.
No other State wants to be California right now. Californians are leaving California in droves. My State is building new city water towers and voting facilities to accomodate all the people moving here from Blue States. Thirty percent of businesses have left San Francisco. Think about that. Do you want that happening in your city? It will, if Gavin is elected.
Newsom has a track record. A very bad track record. I dont think his gift of gab can overcome it.
Gavin Newsom wants to turn the United States into California.
He’s practically said that himself – he said that California is a “model of progressive policies”, watch them to see how those policies work.
Again, I hope you’re right. My worry is that he would be appealing to irrational people, e.g., university ‘students’ and chardonnay-swilling suburban women.
Being under indictment doesn’t mean he’s guilty.
Read up on those charges, they are as phony as a three dollar bill.
Trumped-up charges for Trump.
Debasing the currency, like junk science, is a symptom, not a cause of the decline. Politics is downstream from culture, which is downstream from philosophy. An ideological premise that regards people as the means to someone’s—anyone’s—ends, rather than as ends in themselves, will necessarily result in a debauched culture and a debased politics. That’s true whether the premise is held explicitly out of malice or absorbed implicitly via intellectual abdication. As for junk science, it’s evidence of a lack of integrity and a contempt for ideas, and that too has its roots in philosophy.
‘An ideological premise that regards people as the means to someone’s—anyone’s—ends, rather than as ends in themselves, will necessarily result in a debauched culture and a debased politics.’
I’m not sure what you mean here. Production requires the use of many ‘means’, including labor. As long as this involves peaceful, voluntary exchanges, I don’t see any ‘debauchery’ taking place. In fact, the adoption and expansion of such a system of exchanges is what has brought us from poking in the ground with sharp sticks to where we are today.
My premise is that the above system, call it what you will, should be self reinforcing. Its decline, therefore, can only come about if more and more people decide that they can benefit more from coerced, involuntary exchanges. This in turn, I would throw at the feet of an entity, i.e., the State, that has successfully co-opted the monetary system through which people are compensated.
I just meant that debasing the currency is the result, not the cause, of a moral and cultural decline. Morality is the province of the philosophers and intellectuals; culture being downstream of philosophy, their debased ethics results in a debased culture. Politics being downstream of culture, the electorate tolerates and votes for people who, like them, are comfortable treating others as the means to their ends. Want a $70 million high school football stadium but can’t get people to shell out voluntarily? Use politicians to screw your neighbor out of more of his income.
Peaceful, voluntary exchanges require the premise that each individual is an end in himself, and that premise will result in a society in which no one, including the government, initiates the use of force and compulsion against others to get what they want. Coerced, involuntary interactions assume the opposite: that people are the means to each other’s ends. Or to state it the other way around: The assumption that people are the means to each other’s ends will result in a society organized around compulsion and involuntary interactions. In that case, the state will inevitably co-opt the monetary system, debase it, and confiscate property and wealth. Among other things.
I believe we can agree that cultural and moral decline can occur in the absence of currency debasement. What I’ve been trying to say, albeit badly, is that if an entity wanted to gain absolute dominance by ensuring the systematic cultural and moral decline of a nation’s institutions, then currency debasement would be the ideal tool.
But not rotting for the lobbyists….
story tip
USDA to adjust GHG model to help ethanol get aviation fuel subsidy (yahoo.com)
Bingo, RG! Fractional reserve banking enables big government and distorts EVERY market it touches.
Look what the propaganda and fake science can achieve…
“””FeriouslySlippant
How good are cheap flights…?
I know, let’s all book a cruise to Antarctica so we can watch it melt.
Best get in quick if you want a photo with a penguin…
We’re a sick, sick species…”””
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2023/sep/07/i-dont-want-to-sound-like-a-broken-record-but-the-climate-really-is-changing
Bonkers
Or you could go on a cruise to Greenland run aground and watch the Artic winter unfold
Nice that an “exploration” vessel was unable to “explore” the depth of the ocean in its immediate vicinity.
Must be run by “climate scientists”. Their models were unable to correctly “predict” the “future” depth in their projected path of travel.
The models probably had an input for the CAGW caused accelerated sea level rise so they missed the ACTUAL depth by a meter or two.
If the GWPF is now so into “open review”, perhaps they could be more ‘open’ about who it is that funds them.
It isn’t your man, Soros….
Open Review gives even moronic AGW fools, like you, a chance to actually counter anything that is wrong in the paper.
But you can’t, and you won’t.
And their funding is an absolute pittance compared to the billions of funding for the AGW scam. !
With the help of the Internet Archives Wayback Machine the funding of the AGW scam is about $66 Billion since 1989. That’s just the United States, which is probably the bulk of it.
That sounds a bit light to me. I think a recheck is in order.
“funding of the AGW scam “
How did you define that?
Probably misses the regulatory changes that create “must take”, etc, and CO2 credits/costs, and tax or utility rebates, appliance mandates, inflating costs or closure of gas and oil drilling, pipeline cancellation, coal fired generation, massive inflation of utility bills, more…..
Adds up to 1000s of $Billions. (to easy to say single digit $Trillions)….and mis/mal spends deficit/taxpayer raised funds otherwise more useful for social, defense, and productive economy.
Why does their funding affect science? Unless you’re willing to accept that funding of every green organisation or WOKE university influences their ‘science’.
Have you tried asking them?
utterly irrelevant!
In the U.S. at least, the CIA takes a leading roll in setting the “science” narrative, so much so that for example it funded (some say bribed) covid researchers to press the Wuhan wet market hypothesis.
https://www.thegwpf.org/
It is revealing that you couldn’t post a single counterpoint to the article, instead you bring in the dumb funding angle instead thus your contribution here remains ZERO.
When all else fails, attack the messenger.
The rest of us can rejoice, because TFN has just admitted that he can find nothing wrong with the message.
It’s easy to believe in a computer model because all the math in it is understood, the problem those who believe have is that nature doesn’t follow the model.
Yes. This is the wider problem. Generationally, I think most people still have a strong tendency to uncritically believe something that comes out of a computer. Pocket calculators do maths correctly, right? (Actually no, under some circumstances). And maths is boring and a bit hard, isn’t it?
Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can then write a computer program that gives them false credibility. Maybe humans will get away from this foolish belief in later generations. We certainly need to.
Anybody who has maintained somebody else’s software usually thinks about much of it “why have they done that”. When fixing a problem the question “is it working now?” is answered one of two ways either “it seems to be” or so far”.
Unfortunately climate doesn’t seem to be working properly at the moment and some bugs need to be fixed so it matches the software.
LOL!
Over 40 years ago, I read a comment in a weekly computer rag. It was about annotating programmes. A programme that modified itself on each iterative pass.
In the annotation, the programmer wrote “when I first wrote this programme, only two people understood how it worked, myself and God, now only God knows “.
I leaned JavaScript and wrote a couple of programs to read some pages off of an internet site around 7 years ago. I haven’t used JavaScript since and I haven’t a clue how they work now.
Maybe they just forgot to upload the latest version of the climate firmware.
4.6 million people die each year from cold and 500,000 die from heat. Cold and cool weather cause increased strokes and heart attacks when our blood vessels constrict from the cold air entering our lungs.
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
Very good point. a computer model can be complete bullshit, but still look amazingly impressive.
A computer model is only as good as its components are accurate representations of reality.
Covid modelling contained many very uncertain components.
Climate modelling omits very many certain and uncertain components. They are different things
And of course those in the UK (and US) who freaked out about Ferguson’s covid deaths predictions utterly failed to check his track record. I did make the point to my MP that it isn’t necessary to be an expert to challenge what a scientist claims – and by challenge I mean ask searching questions to test the reliability of the claims – but I’m not sure he grasped the concept.
I used to require all my staff to specify and explain every assumption value used in their profit & loss spreadsheets.
Otherwise the habit of “last year + 5%” was the usual assumption.
Often totally removed from current reality.
TFN will want to know if this information was fact checked by the BBC.
Of course it was – in the same way that Marianna Spring’s CV was 100% honest!
It is not clear exactly either in the draft or in the WUWT how interested parties should submit reviews or suggestions
Easy to find on GWPF web site:
https://www.thegwpf.org/gwpf-open-peer-review/
and from top of that page:
https://www.thegwpf.org/category/open-peer-reviews/
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”― Upton Sinclair
We followed the science and it simply wasn’t there. We then followed the money and found the science.
Computer models are tools that are used to support confirmation bias.
They operate on the GIGO principle.
That is true of climate models, it is not true of models in general.
Airplanes, cars, bridges, drugs, electronic circuits, etc., are all designed using models.
The modern world would grind to a halt if the use of models were to stop.
Of course these models are all validated against the real world, and prototypes are always built before committing to large scale manufacturing.
That reminds me, factories are also designed and laid out using models.
Salute!
Good point about “models”, Mark..
In my day we called them “sims”, and if it were a software heavy process we would use the actual production code and wring out the whole system to separate hardware problems from code errors or assumptions.
Our best testing was finding code that did not function correctly if the hardware guys had not envisioned a strange failure that confused the code. The Sandia folks were the harshest when looking at our control of nuclear weapons – we designed, tested and implemented weapon control systems.
Gums sends…
All science is models. Some are good, some are near useless and some are completely useless. The more useless they are the less scientific and the more metaphysical they are.
Disease vector modelling has wide outcome spreads, the more so when accurate data is not available. But it is, and was, all we had.
Politicians were under pressure to do something, and so acting as if they knew what they were doing was more important than doing nothing, to ‘see what happened’.
I think it is less than helpful to conflate headless chicken syndrome with outright climate fraud.
Covid was a real threat. Unusually. No one really knew what to do and the optimal policy response is something we probably still don’t know, even with 100% hindsight.
Climate is not a real threat, and we clearly now know what at least was not the optimal policy response.
It behooves us to not act like Left wing fantasists and think in simplistic terms. Whilst it is likely that some elements of the governing elites used covid to increase their power, they did not invent it. I believe that is an understandable opinion to hold, but it is a false one.
Agreed. In the UK they found themselves in a very difficult situation. The advice from people with the reputation of being experts in their field was to lock down immediately. If you are in that position, with very few contradictory voices, you think about the after the fact situation.
Follow the advice and you have a reasonable explanation why you did it. Go against it, and it turns into the forecast catastrophe, and you really have no excuse.
In the end, on the final demand for another lockdown, I think Johnson refused.
I’m not even sure in retrospect and with benefit of hindsight what the right decision was. Probably to isolate the elderly only, and keep the schools open. But the risk they faced if they did that in the pre-vaccination days was the hospital system overwhelmed by critical cases. As happened to Italy. And at the time they were vilified for being thought to have a policy based on the creation of herd immunity. Which I don’t think they actually had, and even if they did, in retrospect maybe some form of such a policy may have been better than lockdown. But I doubt they would have got away with doing it and admitting doing it. The chorus of rage from the media and the political fallout would have been too great, even had the evidence favored it.
The thing they did right was get a competent person, a real genuine expert, in charge of vaccine procurement, and a competent minister in charge of rolling it out.
I am not at all confident I would have done any better than the then government on the lockdown/quarantine decision. Still less that the present army of armchair critics would have done any better.
Maybe if there actually was a proper vaccine and folks also weren’t blocked from using therapeutics that did work, things would have turned out much better.
In conversations I had with people at the time, my views were: (i) I didn’t envy the politicians who had to make the decisions, but they chose the gig and they carried a responsibility to be rational; and (ii) I was quite prepared to accept that they might make what later turned out to be a spectacularly wrong call provided there were reasonable grounds at the time for the call they did make. The best politician – a very rare breed these days – can judge when doing nothing is the best policy. Resisting the urge to do something for the sake of being seen to be doing something is what we should expect (but rarely, if ever, get) from politicians. Making up rules on the hoof, which went on through the pandemic, is the opposite of rational.
“Covid was a real threat.” I would respectfully submit that the response to covid was a more immediate threat than the virus itself.
The COVID-19 virus has killed millions worldwide.
Bull. As with the first “severe” acute respiratory syndrome the real number is likely fewer than 800. Lower, probably, since nearly everyone in the world was already immune when it first showed up in 2019, through cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses, which cause around 15% of colds and always have.
Even with what we did do, hospitals around the country were approaching capacity and medical personnel were having to work over time continuously for months.
Leo says:” No one really knew what to do…”
There were folks trying to give sound guidelines like the use of HCQ, but that was made fun of. Sweden went with herd immunity idea and that was ignored. We knew kids were pretty safe but we made them wear masks and sit six feet apart or not go to school at all.
We have a constitution to follow but that was ignored and freedom was thrown aside.
We could buy liquor but not go to church. At Walmart here in Michigan certain aisles were roped off so you couldn’t buy paint but you could bread. We worried about staying six feet apart but would hand possibly contaminated coins back in change.
You are more forgiving than I Leo. Abandoning the principles this country was founded on seems a bad idea.
Never make decisions in a panic.
I know several doctors and nurses, and they were all working extra shifts and were worried about running out of beds because of COVID.
Many people have forgotten that the first inklings we had about COVID were reports from Wuhan about patients being kept in hallways because all the rooms were full. Also reports that crematoriums were working extra shifts.
Why down vote facts? Unless you are peeved about the facts not supporting your pet delusions?
Because none of those reasons were good enough to throw out our constitutional rights. Nor being lied to for months.
From the article: “Separation of human-induced warming from natural temperature variation is far more difficult than that portrayed by the UN-funded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC”
I don’t think “more difficult” is the phrase to use. This gives the impression that the IPCC can actually separate human-induced from natural temperature variation. They cannot. All they have are assumptions and assertions, not backed up by any evidence.
The facts are there has never been a connection established between the amount of CO2 in the air and the Earth’s weather or climate. Not one time. Saying there is a connection, as climate alarmists do, does not make it so.
Did universities ever dominate disinterested enquiry? If so, when?. Certainly, during the Enlightenment period – lasting about 150 years (1640 ~ 1790) – there was plenty of “open and disinterested enquiry on behalf of humanity“. Yet ONLY ONE great Enlightenment thinker – Immanuel Kant – was primarily an academic. I think universities today have a strangle hold on thought. Snuffing out useful ideas. They did not so much “abandon their role”; more the case: they totally monopolized thought and enquiry to snuff out anything useful to humanity.
When ‘scientists’ say models produce data, you have a big problem.
Models produce output, which is compared against data to determine how close to reality the models are.
“…Universities have abandoned their historical role of open and disinterested enquiry on behalf of humanity,…”
Yeah, not so much. University life has been a knife fight since there have been universities. Look what Newton did to Leibniz.
Excellent. My rational side says “why did it take so long to say the obvious” and my cynical side says “this will be censored, scandalized, and buried”. The Marxists tentacles are long, many, and deep. Often it is said the truth will come out in the end but what about the damage done in the meantime?
John von Neumann the famous mathematician once said “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” Climate models have hundreds of parameters. They can be made to output whatever their author wants them to.