Brownstone Institute
Beware Catastrophizing Climate Models and Activists
From the Brownstone Institute
All true believers of The Science™ of climate change have taken careful note of the lessons offered by the coronavirus pandemic during 2020–22 for managing the ‘climate emergency.’ The two agendas share nine items in common that should leave us worried, very worried.
The first is the revolting spectacle of the hypocrisy of the exalted elites who preach to the deplorables the proper etiquette of abstinence to deal with the emergency, and their own insouciant exemption from a restrictive lifestyle. Most recently we witnessed the surreal spectacle of Britain’s Parliament interrogating disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson on allegations that he serially broke the lockdown rules he had imposed on everyone else—but not questioning the anti-scientific stupidity of the rules themselves. Possibly the most notorious American example was California Governor Gavin Newsom and his cronies dining maskless in the appropriately named French Laundry restaurant at a time when this was verboten, being served by fully masked staff.
Similarly, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Al Gore, and John Kerry have all been widely mocked for jetting around the world to warn people about global warming. I wonder if anyone has done a calculation of the total carbon footprint of each annual Davos gathering where CEOs, prime ministers and presidents, and celebrities fly in on private jets, are driven around in gas-guzzling limousines and preach to us on the critical urgency of reducing emissions? I understand the hookers do quite well during that week, so perhaps there is a silver lining.
A second common element between Covid and climate change is the mismatch between models that inform policy and data that contradict the models. The long track record of abysmally wrong catastrophist predictions on infectious diseases from the Pied Piper of Pandemic Porn, Professor Neil Ferguson, is if anything exceeded by the failures of climate change alarmist predictions. The most recent example of the drum roll of “The end is nigh and this is absolutely your last chance to avert the end of the world from climate collapse” is yet another Chicken Little Sixth Assessment Report from the indefatigable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At some point the IPCC morphed from a team of scientists into activists. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report warns us. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “survival guide for humanity.” But a one-time climate action journalist-turned-sceptic, Michael Shellenberger, described the UN as a “Climate Disinformation Threat Actor.”
Calls for urgent climate action based on the language of “edging towards ‘tipping points” have been made over many years. Atmospheric scientists and former IPCC members Richard McNider and John Christy note that climate modeling forecasts have “always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.” A few examples:
- In 1982, UNEP Executive Director Mostafa Tolba warned of an irreversible environmental catastrophe by 2000 without immediate urgent action.
- In 2004, a Pentagon report warned that by 2020, major European cities would be submerged by rising seas, Britain would be facing a Siberian climate and the world would be caught up in mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting.
- In 2007, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri declared: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”
- Most hilariously, in Montana the Glacier National Park installed “Goodbye to the glaciers” plaques, warning: “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020.” Come 2020, all 29 glaciers were still there but the signs were gone, taken down by embarrassed park authorities.
Third, the rapidly consolidating Censorship Industrial Complex covered both agendas until Elon Musk began releasing the Twitter Files to expose what was happening. This refers to the extraordinary censorship and suppression of dissenting voices, with extensive and possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech—and, in the case of the pandemic, also Big Pharma and academia.
Even truth was no defence, for example with accounts of vaccine injuries, if their effect was to promote narrative scepticism. The social media Big Tech censored, suppressed, shadow banned and slapped labels of “false,” “misleading,” “lacking context” etc. to content at variance with the single source ministries of truth. “Fact-checking” was weaponized using fresh young graduates—with no training, skills or capacity to sift between authentic and junk science—to put such judgmental stamps on pronouncements from world-leading experts in their field.
Fourth, an important explanation for the spread of Covid and climate catastrophism is the promotion of fear and panic in the population as a means to spur drastic political action. Both agendas have been astonishingly successful.
Polls have consistently shown the hugely exaggerated beliefs about the scale of the Covid threat. On climate change, the gap between the stringent actions required, the commitments made and the actual record thus far is used to create panic. The notion that we are already doomed promotes a culture of hopelessness and despair best epitomized by Greta Thunberg’s anguished cry: “How dare you” steal my dreams and childhood with empty words.
A fifth common theme is the appeal to scientific authority. For this to work, scientific consensus is crucial. Yet, driven by intellectual curiosity, questioning existing knowledge is the very essence of the scientific enterprise. For the claim to scientific consensus to be broadly accepted, therefore, supporting evidence must be exaggerated, contrary evidence discredited, sceptical voices stilled and dissenters ridiculed and marginalized. This has happened in both agendas: just ask Jay Bhattacharya on one and Bjorn Lomborg on the other.
A sixth shared element is the enormous expansion of powers for the nanny state that bosses citizens and businesses because governments know best and can pick winners and losers. Growing state control over private activities is justified by being framed as minor and temporary inconveniences in the moral crusade to save Granny and the world.
Yet in both agendas, policy interventions have over-promised and under-delivered. The beneficial effects of interventions are exaggerated, optimistic forecasts are made and potential costs and downsides are discounted. Lockdowns were supposedly required for only 2-3 weeks to flatten the curve and vaccines, we were promised, would help us return to pre-Covid normalcy without being mandatory. Similarly, for decades we have been promised that renewables are getting less expensive and energy will get cheaper and more plentiful. Yet increased subsidies are still needed, energy prices keep rising, and energy supply gets less reliable and more intermittent.
Seventh, the moral framing has also been used to discount massive economic self-harm. Alongside the substantial and lasting economic damage caused by savage lockdowns to businesses and the long-term consequences of a massive printing of money, the obstinate persistence of excess deaths is painful proof of collective public health self-harm.
Similarly, the world has never been healthier, wealthier, better educated, and more connected than today. Energy intensity played a critical role in driving agricultural and industrial production that underpin the health infrastructure and comfortable living standards for large numbers of people worldwide. High income countries enjoy incomparably better health standards and outcomes because of their national wealth.
Eighth, government policies in both agendas have served to greatly widen economic inequalities within and among nations with fat profits for Big Pharma and rent-seeking Green Energy. A lot of money was said to be required to keep Mahatma Gandhi in the style of poverty he demanded. Similarly, a lot of money is required to support Covid and climate policy magical thinking where governments can solve all problems by throwing more money that must neither be earned nor repaid.
In the triumph of luxury politics, the costs of the rich suffused in the golden glow of virtue are borne by the poor. Should a billion more Chinese and Indians have stayed poor and destitute over the last four decades, so Westerners could feel virtuous-green? Alternatively, for post-industrial societies, climate action will require cutbacks to living standards as subsidies rise, power prices go up, reliability comes down and jobs are lost.
Attempts to assess the balance of costs and benefits of Covid and climate policies are shouted down as immoral and evil, putting profits before lives. But neither health nor climate policy can dictate economic, development, energy and other policies. All governments work to balance multiple competing policy priorities. What is the sweet spot that ensures reliable, affordable and clean energy security without big job losses? Or the sweet spot of affordable, accessible and efficient public health delivery that does not compromise the nation’s ability to educate its young, look after the elderly and vulnerable and ensure decent jobs and life opportunities for families?
The final common element is the subordination of state-based decision-making to international technocrats. This is best exemplified in the proliferation of the global climate change bureaucracies and the promise—threat?—of a new global pandemic treaty whose custodian will be a mighty World Health Organisation. In both cases, the dedicated international bureaucracy will have a powerful vested interest in ongoing climate crises and serially repeating pandemics.
Reposted from Resistance Press
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration.
And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security for 2020 and 2022, which, if you understand the implications of that, should make you spit out your coffee upon learning.
More than any other agency, it became the operationally relevant government during this period. It was the agency that worked through third parties and packet-switching networking to take down your Facebook group. It worked through all kinds of intermediaries to keep a lid on Twitter. It managed LinkedIn, Instagram, and most of the other mainstream platforms in a way that made you feel like your opinions were too crazy to see the light of day.
The most astonishing court document just came out. It was unearthed in the course of litigation undertaken by America First Legal. It has no redaction. It is a reverse chronicle of most of what they did from February 2020 until last year. It is 500 pages long. The version available now takes an age to download, so we shrunk it and put it on fast view so you can see the entire thing.
What you discover is this. Everything that the intelligence agencies did not like during this period – doubting lockdowns, dismissing masking, questioning the vaccine, and so on – was targeted through a variety of cutouts among NGOs, universities, and private-sector fact-checkers. It was all labeled as Russian and Chinese propaganda so as to fit in with CISA’s mandate. Then it was throttled and taken down. It managed remarkable feats such as getting WhatsApp to stop allowing bulk sharing.
It gets crazier. CISA documented that it deprecated the study of Jay Bhattacharya from May 2020 that showed that Covid was far more widespread and less dangerous than the CDC was claiming, thus driving down the Infection Fatality Rate within the range of a bad flu. This was at a time when it was widely assumed to be the black death. CISA weighed in to say that the study was faulty and tore down posts about it.
The granularity of their work is shocking, naming Epoch Times, Unz.org, and a whole series of websites as disinformation, often with a crazy spin that identified them with Russian propaganda, white supremacy, terrorist activity, or some such. Reading through the document conjures up memories of Lenin and Stalin smearing the Kulaks or Hitler on the Jews. Everything that is contrary to government claims becomes foreign infiltration or insurrectionist or otherwise seditious.
It’s a very strange world these people inhabit. Over time, of course, the agency ended up demonizing much authentic science plus a majority of public opinion. And yet they stayed at it, fully convinced of the rightness of their cause and the justness of their methods. It seems never to have occurred to this agency that we have a First Amendment that is part of our laws. It never enters the discussion at all.
AFL summarizes the document as follows.
- CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex to inform its censorship of alleged foreign disinformation narratives regarding COVID-19.
- Unelected bureaucrats at CISA weaponized the homeland security apparatus, including FEMA, to monitor COVID-19 speech dissenting from “expert” medical guidance, including President Trump’s comments about taking Hydroxychloroquine in 2020. Many of these “false” narratives later turned out to be true, calling into question the government’s ability to identify “misinformation,” regardless of its authority to do so.
- To determine what was “foreign disinformation,” CISA relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex’s usual suspects (Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory) — even those discredited for erroneously attributing domestic content to foreign sources (Alliance for Securing Democracy). CISA even relied on foreign government authorities (EU vs. Disinfo) and foreign government-linked groups (CCDH, GDI) that advocated for the demonetization and deplatforming of individual Americans to monitor and target constitutionally protected speech by American citizens.
For years, this story of censorship has unfolded in shocking ways. This document among tens of thousands of pages is surely among the most incriminating. And discussing it is apparently still taboo because the Subcommittee report on Covid never once mentions CISA. Why might that be?
In the strange world of D.C., CISA might be considered untouchable because it was staffed out of the National Security Agency which itself is a spinoff of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thus does its activities generally fall under the category of classified. And its many functioning assets in the civilian sector are legally bound to keep their relationships and connections private.
Thank goodness at least one judge believed otherwise and forced the agency to cough it up.
From the Brownstone Institute
So, who exactly is Wei Cai, the scientific staff member of Germany’s public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), who, as revealed in hitherto hidden minutes of the institute’s “COVID-19 Crisis Group,” comes from none other than Wuhan? And when I say “hitherto hidden minutes,” I mean hidden precisely in the ostensible leak of the unredacted “RKI Files.” For, as I discussed in a recent article, the file in question was not included among the supposedly “complete minutes” assembled by Aya Velazquez, the prostitute-turned-journalist and anti-Covid-measure activist who unveiled the documents at a highly-publicized press conference in Berlin on July 23rd.
As discussed in a postscript to that article, although I have asked her, I have not received a coherent answer from Velazquez as to how she could have overlooked these minutes, which are indeed the minutes of the very first RKI “crisis group” meeting of which we have a public record.
Be that as it may, the reason why the revelation of the RKI’s link to Wuhan is important – and why German authorities may have preferred that it remain secret – is because, as I have documented in, among other places, my ‘The Greatest Story Never Told,’ Germany in fact had a very active publicly-funded research partnership in virology with several research institutions in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Indeed, the German-Chinese virology network, known as the “Sino-German Transregional Collaborative Research Centre” or TRR60, gave rise to a full-fledged German-Chinese virology lab, not only right in Wuhan but indeed right in what is regarded as the area of the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in the city. For this and other (microbiological) reasons outlined in my ‘The Smoking Gun in Wuhan,’ the members of the German-Chinese virology partnership ought to be prime suspects in any genuine investigation into a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. But, instead, they have been completely ignored in favour of suspects in far-off places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
The below photo shows various members of the partnership, as well as associated German and Chinese luminaries in the field of virology. It was taken in 2015 at a “Sino-German Symposium on Infectious Diseases” in Berlin organised by the German Co-Director of TRR60, Ulf Dittmer. Dittmer is the bald man in the middle of the picture. None other than Christian Drosten, the German designer of the ‘gold standard’ SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, and Shi Zhengli, the WIV’s renowned bat coronavirus expert, can be seen together in the lower left-hand corner of the picture.
Other notables include Chen Xinwen, the then-director of the WIV. Chen is the small, somewhat buck-toothed man in the lower right-hand corner. He was a member of TRR60. The young woman with the long hair next to Shi Zhengli appears to be the current Director of the WIV, Wang Yanyi. The former President of the Robert Koch Institute, Reinhard Burger, is also in the picture. He is the white-haired man with the blue shirt near the centre of the group.
Given the WIV’s famed practice of gain-of-function research, it is worth noting that this get-together took place precisely during the American moratorium on such research. It is also worth noting that Christian Drosten himself, as touched upon in my ‘The Greatest Story‘, has coordinated a German research project on the MERS coronavirus involving gain-of-function experiments. Indeed, that ‘RAPID’ project got underway just two years after the Berlin get-together and likewise while the American moratorium still remained in place.
So, did Wei Cai have anything to do with the German-Chinese virology network? Well, yes, from her publications, we know that she did. Thus, she is a co-author with Michael Roggendorf of this 2013 paper on PCR detection of Hepatitis and HIV infections. Roggendorf is none other than the founder of the German-Chinese partnership. He is the white-haired man with the red bowtie next to RKI president Burger in the above photo. The former Chair of the Department of Virology at Essen University Hospital, he would cede his position as German Co-Director of TRR60 to his colleague Dittmer in 2013. Essen University Hospital is the lead German institution in the German-Chinese virology partnership.
Roggendorf can be seen below receiving the “Chime Bell” award from the Governor of Hubei Province in 2016 in honor of his contributions to the German-Chinese partnership. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province.
In early 2020, Wei Cai would then appear as co-author with Christian Drosten on a paper about the famous first cluster of Covid-19 cases in Germany. As discussed in my series of articles here, here, and here, it was precisely this cluster that first raised the spectre of ‘asymptomatic spread’ of Covid-19, even though – contrary to what was claimed by Drosten and other German authors in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine – Patient Zero was not in fact asymptomatic and none of the members of the cluster appear to have been particularly ill.
As touched upon in my previous article, Wei Cai would then go on to complete a PhD in Medicine at Drosten’s Charité University Hospital in Berlin, although under the direction of her supervisor in the Infectious Diseases Unit of the RKI, Walter Haas. Per her Linked-In page (hat-tip: FrauHodl), she completed a first degree in medicine at the Hubei University of Chinese Medicine in Wuhan in 2000 before going to Germany to do a master’s in public health in Bremen.
It should be noted that Wei Cai is an epidemiologist, not a virologist. Hence, she would not have been involved in the sort of laboratory experimentation on viruses that was being conducted under the aegis of TRR60 in Wuhan.
Nonetheless, the questions remain. Why was the very existence of the RKI’s staff member from Wuhan redacted in the original official release of the “RKI Files?” Why were the minutes in question, now unredacted and revealing her existence, hidden in the ostensible leak, as if the leakers were somehow sensitive to the Government’s concerns? And why, finally, do German – unlike American – links to Wuhan appear to be off-limits for German media, both traditional and new? Why the omertà?
Republished from The Daily Sceptic
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