Free speech is under attack in the politicised world of climate science and disgust at the recent cancellation of Alimonti et al. by Springer Nature continues to grow. Readers will recall that the paper written by four Italian scientists led by Physics Professor Gianluca Alimonti said past data did not point to a “climate crisis”. It was retracted on August 23rd, 20 months after initial publication, following a concerted campaign by activist journalists and scientists. Science writer Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., who first published a number of whistle-blower emails about a Springer inquiry, has returned to the fray, noting: “We should not be in a situation where activist journalists, many funded by billionaires, enlist activist scientists to demand retraction of a science article and then the world’s arguably leading scientific publisher meekly obeys. We must do better.”
Francis Menton writes the widely-read Manhattan Contrarian and he recently noted that free speech today is under assault from the Left all the time. He used the Alimonti affair as an example of this crackdown on dissent.
If you wonder why the climate alarm narrative seems so completely to dominate public discussion (even though it is utter nonsense), then you need to understand that there is an orthodoxy enforcement police operating behind the scenes. Most of the time the operation of this orthodoxy enforcement mechanism is invisible to the general public. Climate sceptics can’t get jobs in academia, and go into other careers; when sceptics write papers, they get rejected and are never heard of again. But every once in a while something happens to bring aspects of the orthodoxy enforcement mechanism momentarily into the open. That has recently occurred with respect to a paper published in a European scientific journal in early 2022.
Again regular readers will recall that the paper attracted little comment until September last year when the Daily Sceptic covered the findings in an article that attracted 9,000 retweets. Following subsequent coverage in the Australian and Sky Australia, the Guardian and state-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP) launched counterattacks. AFP ‘Herald of the Anthropocene’ Marlowe Hood said the data were “grossly manipulated” and “fundamentally flawed”. They were soon joined by a number of activist scientists including Michael Mann who sneered at his fellow academics, dismissing them as “nuclear physics dudes in Italy” from “totally unrelated fields”.
In Pielke’s latest contribution, he says it is his “strong opinion” that the sole reason to retract the paper is not to do with the analysis of the data, but the one sentence that reads: “In conclusion on the basis of observation data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
The joy of the successful activists appears unconfined. Marlowe Hood recently collected £88,000 from the foundation of the green technology supporting BBVA bank. He tweeted: “It may be akin to removing a speck of dust from a rubbish heap, but I confess to taking satisfaction in seeing this egregiously bad climate study retracted. The remaining question, of course, is how it got into a Springer Nature journal to start with.”
For its part, BBVA justified its recent large payment to Hood by noting “his ability to synthesise complex scientific models and studies and explain them in simple terms”.
The final Springer retraction notice did not detail any substantive issue with the Alimonti paper, writes Pielke, only vaguely refering to the Guardian and AFP articles in the passive voice — “concerns were raised”. The journal’s year-long attempt to review the paper was “apparently invented as they went along”.
Dr. Pielke is evidently an old-school science academic and he has a mild criticism about editorialising by using the term “climate crisis”. Whether there is a climate crisis is a political judgement and not one that emerges from data and evidence. But he goes on to note that anyone familiar with peer-reviewed literature knows that editorialising is common, and in the climate literature, “absolutely pervasive”. In fact, he conducted a review of Google Scholar and found more than 300,000 papers that assert a “climate crisis”. A minor editorial comment by the Alimonti authors that passed through peer review, he observes, is no way a justification for a retraction. In his view it is one of the “most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen”.
Meanwhile, another academic whistle-blower has cast further shocking light on the policing methods that evidently lie behind much climate science publishing. As the Daily Sceptic noted on Tuesday, Dr. Patrick Brown of John Hopkins University said he wrote a new paper on California wildfires in Nature according to the approved script in order to get it published. This of course involved boosting the role of ‘climate change’ and downplaying natural causes and the increasing role played by arsonists. He said he has learnt that there is a formula for success in getting papers published in high profile journals such as Nature and Science. “Unfortunately, the formula is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating knowledge for society,” he said. This formula, added Brown, distorts a great deal of climate science research, and misinforms the public.
Francis Menton highlights Pielke’s finding that 300,000 science papers assert the existence of a climate crisis. “A few hundred billion dollars of Government money can buy a lot of fake climate alarmism,” he concludes.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Marianna Spring can be briefly heard on this BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast this morning, ‘AntiSocial – Covid vaccines and misinformation’ – but don’t let Marianna Spring put you off, I said ‘briefly’ and it is in fact an excellent programme, in which Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill is given the opportunity to make his case for free speech, and the presenter, Adam Fleming, makes a genuine attempt to be fair to all sides.
The whole series of ‘AntiSocial’ programmes on BBC Radio 4 are surprisingly fair and excellent, not the usual BBC propaganda, but much more open, and are well worth listening to.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001k837
Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to a BBC programme on misinformation. I wonder how many thousands of Roberts radios (other brands available) have been switched off for good over the last 3 years of unabating BBC propaganda.
Very much in agreement on point one and sadly I’m one of the thousands with a Roberts radio that hasn’t been switched on for the best part of three years.
“The originator of the New World Order conspiracy theory almost certainly believed his.”
Lol. Imagine a world in which powerful people globally talked to each other, shared information and collaborated (when it suited them) in order to further their own wealth and power, and pretended that everything they were doing was for the public good. Only a loony would imagine such goings on.
See Piers Morgan and his pitiful ‘apology’.
Speaking of disinformation, isn’t that all we’ve been bombarded with these past 3 years? So with that in mind, here’s a 13min video illustrating some prime examples of disinformation being spouted by Moderna’s CEO, Walensky, Fauci and more, plus more on the clot shot harms, with a particularly unpleasant clip at the end which is basically child abuse, in my opinion.
https://rumble.com/v2ek51m-who-killed-trista-rand-paul-grills-moderna.html
Misinformation, disinformation and fact checking are weapons used by established, traditional media to suppress competition which has flourished online and in social media.
It’s simple old fashioned gangster tactics used to defend “their turf”.
What’s the point of pretending its anything but that? They aren’t presenting an honest argument so why even pretend they are?
Well put. No one seems to ask the question of how all us middle aged people, who were apparently bombarded with mis and disinformation in the years prior to the internet still have functioning brains.
I was told that Freddie Star had eaten a hamster yet I, and many others, didn’t need a middle class public school educated ‘intellectual’ such as Marianna Spring to allow us to disseminate such information.
The arrogance of these people is simply breathtaking, that they alone are so intellectually superior to everyone else that only they can decide what you and I can and cannot see.
I had a small interaction with this woman on twitter who airily dismissed my question as to why, as a Paramedic, I’d not seen a single serious Covid case. She wasn’t curious but simply explained to me that my observations were incorrect because the doctors HAD seen lots of these patients and as Doctors are far more trustworthy than Paramedics I was simply wrong!
I don’t think it is arrogance. They are just paid gatekeepers used to try to control the public discourse so as to support undemocratic narratives.
Misinformation and disinformation are just two of the most recent words to be subjected to ludicrous redefinition by government, institutions and authoritarians.
It has been done to corrupt the true meaning of the words in order to provide the so called elites an opportunity to weaponise language and bolster their cynical psychological projection onto others.
What it appears to mean is a comfortable little box that people draw around themselves, and within which they can unquestioningly for or against something, without anyone forcing them to think about its consequences or alternatives.
Excellent.
Questions are raised given the sheer amount that we have been able to discover in recent years and the concommitant understanding of how much is hidden. The main focus should be, where is a person now. That system is well and truly dead and not just dead but targeted for destruction. If you want to put as much distance as possible between them and you then you need to align yourself with the forces of goodness and beauty and truth. The bickering over the past leave it to them. Let the dead bury the dead.
Stupid cow.
Frome here on in who knows but it certainly isn;t the BBC. We are talking about months not years left of our culture. I hope you are savouring the last if it because if you have clear vision you can see exactly where it is going. I think the nasty English weather will help us with endurance.
I think everything that is happening is part of a grand project that involves the destruction of European Christian civilisation and the eradication of Europeans.
I was born in 61 and it seems to me it was happening fairly slowly, in second gear, (although decimalisation and metrication were acts of gross local cultural vandalism) until 97, when they went up a couple of gears.
After the election in 2019 they went up another couple of gears.
(I’m not aware of any cars with 7 gears,so my analogy will fail with the election of Labour next time!)
Certainly the destruction of the west is foremost for them. And to be honest they have largely achieved it by surrepititious means. The have moved very far forward since 1945. It is our job to tell them here and no further. We are here to restore a basic simple understanding and we will brook no quarter.
The very use of the terms misinformation and disinformation are offensive in themselves. This is simply pandering to the Orwellian language which is being foisted on us. In reality a twisted way of encouraging people to view the world through the vocabulary of the oppressors. I’m having none of it.
Misinformation is a mix up and disinformation is telling lies. End of.
The issue is the lateness of the hour. We aren’t just naive young bucks learning for the first time that things aren’;t as they seem.We are deeply involved in a war and all of our names are on the missiles.I would just ask for a bit more circumspection because in miltary terms we cannot win and to pretend otherwise is just stupid.
I can’t make anyone feel happier but as long as we gel with our intentions then we’re good to go.I genuinely want to keep this country and this culture alive no matter what.We try our best and see what happens.
All you need to remember is that when your country starts using depleted uranium then all optipns are on the table. Don;t imagine that because you’re an island that you will be safe forever from retaliation.Depleted uranium causes major environmental damage and severe birth defects in civilian populations and civilian injuries generally. This was all listed in a 1990s UN report. This is a very serious matter and you won’t be able to brush it under the carpet for long.
Of course the BBC should not have a misinformation correspondent. It is like they employ their own fact checker. The BBC as arbiters of truth, don’t make me laugh. Pure hubris and an insult to our intelligence.
Check out funding for BBC Media Action…including funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
We need to unplug from the BBC forever
*****
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Ditched my BEEB license, 3 years ago and loving it. Have you heard and the latest corruption of Great Expectations with a black Estella. Renamed ” Great Exploitation “. I kid you not. Remind us about the Anne Boleyn fiasco
There is “truth” and there is “Official Truth”.—– There is “Science” and there is “Official Science”. ——-If someone says there is no such thing as an elephant then that would clearly be misinformation as most of us have seen elephants, even if only on TV. ———————–But NO ONE has seen “Climate Change”. You cannot look out of your living room window and say “Oh look at all the climate change”. ——–An individual might think they have seen it. They might feel a hot day and assume that is climate change. They may see a heavy downpour and think that must be climate change. They might hear about some ice melting and assume yep, that is climate change. ———–But those are all assumptions. But when officialdom tells you that those assumptions represent “Truth” then that is misinformation. They are “Official Truth”. ——————Climate Change is therefore “Official Science” in support of Public Policy.