To lockdown sceptics’ great chagrin, recent polls have found that the majority of Brits are still very much pro-lockdown. In a YouGov poll taken in early March, only 19% of respondents said the government’s handling of pandemic was “too strict”, and a remarkable 37% said it was “not strict enough”.
Likewise, when UnHerd asked Brits whether “in retrospect, lockdown was a mistake”, they found there wasn’t a single constituency in the country where a majority agreed. Overall agreement was 27% – which is barely more encouraging than YouGov’s finding.
Now, you can always quibble with polls – the figures might be off by five or ten percentage points. But this clearly isn’t enough to turn 27% into a majority. So what explains Brits’ continued support for a policy that imposed such huge costs while conferring such small benefits (if any)?
Are many of us suffering from Stockholm syndrome? (although it should really be called ‘Wuhan syndrome’). Here are the factors I think are involved.
First: as veteran-lockdown sceptic Lord Hannan has noted with regret, “many of my countrymen couldn’t give two hoots about liberty”. Like the citizens of most Western countries, Brits have long favoured higher taxes and nationalisation of industry. So their support for lockdown isn’t exactly a major anomaly that needs to be explained.
Second: as I noted in my reply to Lord Hannan, Brits massively overestimated the risks of Covid, particularly the risks to the young. This owes partly to general biases in the estimation of small quantities. But it also stems from the intentional use of fear tactics whose very aim was to increase compliance with lockdown.
Third: the theoretical case for ‘flattening the curve’ was strong. If infections rise too high, hospitals will become overwhelmed, leading to huge numbers of deaths; a temporary lockdown can prevent this from happening. The argument is flawed, of course – not least because it ignores the ‘costs’ side of the equation. But it seems quite compelling.
Fourth: case numbers did start falling around the time of each lockdown in 2020. Yet as the statistician Simon Wood has shown, infections were already in decline before the lockdown was called – in all three cases. This can be seen in the chart below, which shows the timing of lockdowns in relation to five reconstructions of infection numbers.
Fifth: while the supposed benefits of lockdown were obvious and immediate, the costs were largely delayed. As a result, members of the public are more likely to credit lockdown for its ‘successes’ than they are to blame lockdown for its failures – including debt, inflation and plunging test scores.
Sixth: for months, credentialed scientists appeared before the television cameras and informed the public that lockdown was the right choice – that the Government really was ‘following the science’. Meanwhile, dissenting scientists (like those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration) were consistently marginalised.
This last point is particularly important, as surveys show that scientists are among the most trusted professionals in the country. Through a combination of groupthink, deplatforming and biased media coverage, the public became convinced that there was such a thing as ‘the science’ and that it supported lockdown.
Three years later, they haven’t changed their minds.
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In Climate Science the tail wags the dog. Almost all “science” related to climate is funded by governments. But they are not interested in funding anything that might indicate humans don’t change the climate very much. You don’t see hundreds of billions pumped into study of the natural variability of the climate, it is all related to changes allegedly caused by humans. But how can you get a full understanding of climate change if you don’t fully understand natural variability? The IPCC itself has a remit which is to search for any and all changes that might indicate humans influence climate while ignoring everything that doesn’t. So there is huge confirmation bias from the very start.
—–Then ofcourse any organisation with the word “government” in it has about as much chance of being impartial as a night out with Jim Dale, Leonardo Di Caprio, David Attenborough and Roger Harrabin. The IPCC is a political body, and its final conclusions are all political. The Politics (Sustainable Development) require there to be a huge problem with climate otherwise the agenda might not well exist. This is why politicians and supporting media get themselves into a tizzy if you question any of their dogma, because it puts the policies around energy use, wealth and resources at risk. Some would even have people jailed for questioning the science or the policies. —This is ofcourse absurd, and indicates that it was never about science in the first place. —-A cautionary tale indeed.
The Climatrons are climate stasists whose religion has as its core belief that without Mankind the climate would be ‘stable’ and unchanging.
It’s a mix of the barking mad, grifters, fraudsters and charlatans… and of course always plentiful, useful idiots.
‘We should stop pretending that if we changed or lowered our emissions the climate would stop changing. That’s the true denial of climate right there’
‘What we need to accept is that regardless of the CO2 in the atmosphere, we are going to have climate change and those shifts could occur over timescales of decades or centuries, and we should be prepared.
And being prepared means we need access to cheap, reliable energy’
That should be in each major political party’s manifesto.
Instead, they have the exact opposite.
The new political reality is for hundreds of MPs from the party in government to lose their jobs at each successive election until they get the message.
The council elections May 2025 will give the Labour Party a massive shock.
Having just vapourised the Conservative Party, the British voter is coming for this deeply unattractive Labour Party next.
Labour may or may not lose the next election but it will make little difference. When they are eventually replaced it will be by the Tories either alone or in a coalition, and that coalition is as likely to be committed to “net zero” as Labour is.
The only mainstream party to explicitly state that they want to scrap net zero were Reform – 14% of the vote. Most people didn’t wake up or kick up during “covid”, even after we were told about scotch eggs.
Let us continue this conversation after the May 2025 council elections.
Happy to. I’m not going anywhere.
There was a petition to repeat the Climate Change Act earlier this year. Got 13,000 odd signatures. I got bored scrolling through the list but petitions to NOT ban the XL Bully dog and to make verified ID a condition of opening a social media account both got 600,000+.
There’s no hope!
I assume you actually prefer it to be repealed, rather than Climate Change Act 2024!
Agrrhhhh. Thanks.
Some Councils will not have elections next year, e.g. https://www.swindon.gov.uk/info/20073/elections_and_voting/937/forthcoming_elections Then there are those that have one-third each year except for one year with none, and others that have all out elections after reorganising the wards. Most Parish Councils have them every four – often with not enough candidates to force a poll.
That said, it’s not unusual for a Party to drop into the doldrums the year after a GE. Councils are often scape goats for that.
What a very sensible chap. I expect that he will be roundly condemned by the Marxists and WEF stooges and ignored by the AGW fanatics.
Everyone else should listen, learn and agree with him and fight the idiots with their Stone Age religion.
11,000 yrs ago the Sahara was a lush Savanna. Climate changes.
Northern Africa was the bread basked of the Roman empire. It only turned into a desert after mainly nomadic muslim invaders let the irrigration systems fall into disrepair.
And Greenland was … green.
Good points! Another reason is that the nomadic Muslim Invaders let their goats eat all the vegetation right down to the nub, right down to the ground. Overgrazing by goats is a major cause of desertification.
One of [our “leaders”] main objectives is to fight CO2 emissions and to do so by phasing out fossil fuels
The main objective is to enable the transition to the post-democratic total-control state.
Wielicki is a geologist? According to Ian Plimer, the history of the world’s climate was always part of a geology university course, and he ridicules the new vocation ‘climate science’.
Long-term carbon cycle data going back 600 million years show a wide variation in CO2 levels from as high as 8,000ppm dropping down to current levels 300 million years ago, returning to around 3,000ppm during the Jurassic period 170 million years ago, followed by a steady decrease down to 180ppm prior to the current interglacial.
This latter value can be considered dangerously low since most terrestrial plant life cannot exist below a concentration of 150ppm. Our combustion of fossil fuels, increasing CO2 concentration to current day levels, is hopefully averting an actual CO2-related climate apocalypse.
And the oceans are the primary source of CO2: the oceans release CO2 with increasing temperature and extract CO2 from the atmosphere with decreasing temperature.
Is Wielicki not aware of all this? Surely he only had to inform his worried students of these basic facts relating to the history of CO2?
They are ignorant of almost everything. The didn’t cast their net wide enough during their education because they lacked the life force to do it. And they are so wise in their own conceit that they make us live in their diminished world.
If the whole existence of the earth (4.6billion years) was compared to a 24 hour clock, humanity would occupy the last 30 seconds before midnight!
My, aren’t we experienced and clever?
Thankfully our very ancient past is slowly being revealed to us. We don’t just have things wrong about where we came from we have them completely wrong. We didn’t come from the ‘great apes’ they came from us. Chimps are would-be humans that refused to accept full incarnation in a human soul a long time ago. Just on a mundane level the neoliberal orthodoxy depends on the idea that we are the best we have ever been and to continue augmenting our current state with technological advances (of a peculiar kind) is the best we can do. On a philosophical level the pronouncements of the WEF sound like babytalk. They are put here to light the way to the truth by showing its absurd and toxic contrary.
“….Plant some trees,” Wielicki says.” Unnecessary, as Mother Nature is greening the planet herself with the gift of CO² – NASA.
Amplified by Dr Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who left when the new, young, zealots in charge decided to turn policy against humankind itself, as opposed to its behaviour.
I recently looked at some of the source code to NASA climate software – GISS ModelE. Complete garbage, I doubt if you could validate the code as replicating the published model.
I give a layman summary of why alleged man-made global warming is a deadly dangerous political hoax in my recent post: https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.