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.
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As I’ve said before, masking is a filthy habit and terrible for the environment. Why is this still even a thing?
What’s really attractive is seeing someone wearing a white surgical mask with a dark vertical line above the nose, showing where grubby fingers have pushed up on the mask for days/weeks/months on end. Thank you for keeping me safe….
Not only disgusting but everyday I find myself picking the revolting things up off the pavement. If people really believe this is a deadly disease why are they throwing their germs around the streets of Britain?
I am constantly amazed when I see someone wearing one with the top edge underneath the nose, (A jaunty style called the ‘Chinnian’), as if the virus only arrives in the body by mouth. What kind of mentality do you have to have for that.?
Viruses can also enter via the eyes. Masks, as my mother would say, are load of old hooey.
Or ears. Or scratches in the skin.
Or eyes. Best put blindfolds on, eh.
Or a plastic bag over the head.
Full body armour is needed me thinks.
Or rolling around inside a plastic ball.
I think that the plastic face visors are even more amusing, so long as you are heavily into schadenfreude.
As I understand it, they are duty bound to treat, so you can simply refuse to wear one. They will try to make you feel uncomfortable but will relent.
Make them feel uncomfortable back. Ask them if you can have this in writing with name signed and printed, their address (or position or whatever) and what exactly they are demanding. Take a photograph of them. Tell them they’ll be hearing from you…
NHS First; Do harm – masks – jabs lockdowns
Stand in the Park
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Make friends & keep sane
Elms Field
Wokingham RG40 2FE
(near Everyman Cinema and play area)
Dead right! I find them offensive and if anyone, including ( and in particular ) health professionals wore one when speaking with me I’d ask them to remove it.
I have asked health professionals to remove their masks so that I can understand them better – post infection cognitive issues – all the hospital clinical staff did remove theirs, my GP refused as it was for my safety! Processing speech without the visual cues of lip movements & facial expression wipes me out.
The staff who did remove theirs were only too glad to do so!
These My correlation is bigger than your correlation! debates need to end. It’s unacceptable to force people to hide their faces, muffle their voices and inhibit their breathing in public, no matter who believes what this will or will not also accomplish. People who are convinced they absolutely cannot live with other people having such extreme rights are free to change their gender (insofar necessary) and emigrate to Iran. End of story.
I agree. I don’t think masks work – and the “science” backs me on that – but honestly I would not wear one even if it could be proved they did.
I will second that tof.
Seriously, what science? Whenever somebody wants to make an important looking statement about face masking, he puts some statistic together which contains the correlations correlating with what he wants to say. Pro mask people have statistics with correlations they claim demonstrate that masks work, anti mask people have statistics with correlations claimed to show that they don’t and/or have harmful effects. Nothing of this qualifies as science, it’s just two tribes of opposing sages bombarding each other and the world with meaningless numbers.
Science is observing some hithero unexplained real-world phenomenon, formulating a theory to explain it based on the observation and then designing and conducting repeatable experiments supposed to prove or disprove the theory. At least with our present knowledge and technical abilities, designing and conducting repeatable experiments proving or disproving that such-and-such a thing causes or prevents an infection with something as miniscule and omnipresent as airborne, endemic viruses is simply not possible as we cannot reset living organisms into the state they were in before the experiment started after it was completed and have no reliable way to cause presence or absence of these viruses.
Handwaiving while chanting syllables of power (or rather, wielding spreadsheets with numbers of power) is not science.
I was referring to the numerous studies which all fail to show any benefit. Call them science, call them what you like, but my point is that the case for masks has not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, though because of the huge complication involved the whole area is difficult – too many factors.
I suggest to call them policy-based evidence making[*]. Or rather making of something which can be passed off as evidence.
[*] Ironically, the German RKI (Robert Koch Institute) claims to be in the exact business of doing that,
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Institut/Ausbau_zum_Public-Health-Institut/RKI2025.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
as someone accidentally mistranslated the English produce evidence, put proofs in front of someone, into fabricate proofs. 🙂
Challenge: –
Explain how a (poorly fitting) cloth mask with pores around 70 nanometers diameter, can prevent passage of virions less than 1 nanometer in size.
This was pointed out at the start of the Covid scam and likened to the use of wiremesh fences to keep mosquitoes out.
Even accepted by WHO (until the dodgy contracts and brown envelopes for flying in masks from Turkey, China etc had been signed.)
Do your best. A convincing response may win you a banana.
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aWNpYWwpIGNvbnRyb2wgZmllbGRzCkRwa2c6OkNvbnRyb2w6OkZpZWxkc0NvcmUgKDNwZXJsKSAt
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cHVsYXRlIGEgYmxvY2sgb2YgUkZDODIyLWxpa2UgZmllbGRzCg==
This is the output of apropos man | head -n 10
base64 encoded and it’s absolutely a good as any other kind of shit someone with more fantasy than creativity can make up. Please feel free to use it as reason for or against anything you want to support or oppose.
Thing is, we never saw this public masking before the shamdemic. If this virus ever was a serious threat, it has now at any rate ceased to be. Has anything changed to make the current situation different to 2019, apart from psychologically?
Oh, we did. In the middle ages, so-called plague doctors used masks to try to avoid succumbing to the plague. This didn’t work and the practice was again discarded. Until a Chinese guy called Wu (you couldn’t make this up) managed to convince himself that masks must work against the plague in 1911 (during the so-called Manchurian Plague). This then convinced our (still) boombaby overlords that another valid and pleasingly exotic (imagine it’s from China!) alternate truth had been found and hence, we were unkindly asked (or rather, harshly ordered) to forget what had been common knowledge for the last 600 years.
They proved with the jabathon that they are not interested in the best outcomes for their patients. Quite simply, there are far too many NHS employees who think the service exists for their benefit and see patients not as paying customers but as a massive inconvenience.
Quite right.
Like those bus drivers who are happy to drive a bus but hate picking up passengers. A few are to be found in every city.
“there are far too many NHS employees who think the service exists for their benefit“
But that’s just it – it does (like all other nationalised industries)
The article’s photo helps me identify seven idiots I hope I need never meet, let alone depend upon in any way, let alone for my health and wellbeing (mental and physical).
About to break into a high energy “Jeruselama”, routine by the looks of it.
I’ll be honest, the stupidest thing I saw today was when I went to an exhibition and outside the loos was a sign that read, “Please use before entering the toilets”, next to a big bottle of hand sanitizer. I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t have seen that pre-Covid and it just seemed to sum up the Clown World, topsy turvey reality that we all unfortunately must deal with. But not a single muzzle was spied ( not even on the 3 chahuahuas being pushed around in a buggy ) so that was a reasonable trade-off.
Maybe it was the modern version of the old engineers joke that you could always tell an engineer, because they were the ones who washed their hands before having a shit.
My GP surgery in Wales still insists everyone wears a mask when coming into the building, and the reception staff are pretty aggressive about enforcing the rule.
I’m not sure, though, whether the nurses and doctors in the surgery could refuse to see a patient who refuses to wear a mask.
And even if in theory they shouldn’t refuse, I’m not sure what a patient could do to force the issue if they were refused an appointment in practice.
Has anyone on this site challenged such GP rules successfully where they live?
Absolutely.
Tell ’em you are exempt.
That should suffice.
I remember two instances where I had to go further, both in the District Hospital.
The first was the kind official who said that without a mask I must stand 2m away from her screen. I, of course, complied but made a performance of not being able to hear / understand her. She tired of this dumb show before I did.
In the other instance, I was curtly reminded that “We do have Covid cases in here, you know!”, to which I responded “Well, I never! Who would have thought it. Sick people in a hospital! Do you also have ladies who are pregnant and due to give birth, in another ward, perhaps?”
She didn’t persist.
Many thanks for your reply, and I’m v impressed with your determination to resist this particularly stupid ‘health’ measure!
It’s happening again because only a very small proportion of the general public read beyond the headlines, which are produced by institutions that refuse to tell the truth, presumably because they fear they’ll lose their funding (by Gates/Soros/whoever).
I have now written twice to the CEO of Bedford NHS Trust (David Carter) asking him for the rationale behind forcing people to wear masks in hospitals and GPs surgeries and………..
Surely the sunk cost fallacy with regard to all the PPE that is still unused and being stored somewhere – what better way to get rid of it than persuade everyone that they need to use it?
The Mask re introduction is just an excuse a cover if you will excuse the pun for an NHS that is so incompetent, so utterly self absorbed in keeping itself fully stocked up with tax payers cash, without supplying anything other than a 3rd world service, it has cunningly found a blame. Us, If we don’t wear a bit of cloth over our faces when entering its hallowed halls of death, we are the ones responsible for its inability to perform, the bit of dirty cloth on your face is according to the NHS the best medicine, the cure all and preventative for all diseases, and if not worn then its our fault that the system is breaking down.
We own the NHS, we decide, its unfit for purpose, its management structure and people couldn’t manage a sh– flow in a sewer, so deny them their excuse, refuse the cloth covering and sue those who have the temerity to treat us as saps.
Typical NHS behaviour. Two pig ignorant administrators in positions of such authority that they can make bovine faeces decisions in the total absence of any empirical evidence and absolutely nobody with the relevant clinical expertise can challenge these thickos.
This must be why “the NHS is the envy of the world” Ho, feckin ho ho.
Surgeon tells it like it is…
Save the image I posted below. And bookmark this
https://brownstone.org/articles/studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
“More than 170 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms”
The tale of the young lady on GB News this week who has hounded by 11 hospital staff members, threatened with being dragged out and the police called because she refused to wear a silly mask with 650-micron holes in it. (A micron is a micro millimetre, or one thousandth of a millimetre)———–The virus is only 5 microns so will and does easily pass through the mask. Imagine throwing 100 snooker balls at some scaffolding. Sure a few balls may hit a pole but most will go straight through. ———–We now live in age where “official science” masquerades as “science” and it is used in a kind of scientific dictatorship where no questions are permitted, and we must simply obey. Just like the “official science” regarding climate. The climate we are told is changing due to humans and that is the end of that discussion. No questions are permitted. Even when the facts don’t fit the theory, which is mostly all of the time, we must all pretend that they do, or we will be dragged out into the street in the case of the young lady on GB news, or have not a rag left on us because we are “climate deniers”, one of the most truly unscientific and infantile terms ever.
Just refuse. My GP receptionist asked if I would wear a mask and I said no. Nothing more was said. At a hospital for tests, the letter said masks must be worn, there were signs everywhere saying they must be worn and everybody was wearing them. I didn’t and nobody said a word. Be brave otherwise the government wins.
FOIA request for their so-called evidence, me thinks.