A 27 year-old footballer, Maddy Cusack, has died.
This has been reported on many news sites, including the BBC.
Reports tell how “devastated” everyone who knew her is. Most state that the cause of her death is unknown.
Beyond this there is no investigation. And no speculation. It is simply declared as a regrettable fact.
However, even cursory digging by the journalists would have hinted at a possible route of inquiry:
If the situation had concerned ‘severe weather events’ or ‘toxic air’ or Russell Brand’s shenanigans or ‘the environmental effects of diesel vehicles’ or ‘transphobia’ or ‘the continuing dangers of Covid’, or any other fashionable anxiety, this association would in all probability have been used to claim causation.
But not in the case of the unfortunate Maddy.
To the rush-to-conclusion group mind, isolated incidents of bad (or good) weather show climate change is happening. And that humans are somehow to blame. Yet isolated incidents of healthy young people dying show nothing at all.
Examples are everywhere:
Extremes of weather will strike the U.K. more frequently owing to the climate crisis, scientists said after data showed that last year was one of the warmest, as well as one of the wettest and sunniest, on record.
Last year was the first to figure in the top 10 for heat, rain and hours of sunshine, in records stretching back more than a century, as moderate British weather is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, according to a report from the Met Office and climate scientists. …
Liz Bentley, Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society [said]…
“When we saw the extreme heat events over the summer last year, the roads were starting to melt, on the rail network the rails started to buckle so all the trains have to slow down and we see lots of cancellations and postponements. The electrical cabling starts to buckle as well, and so we see power outages,” she said. “The impacts that it’s going to have on our daily lives [mean] it will start to have a much more negative effect than just some kind of warm sunny day.”
Conclusion: the ‘climate crisis’ will kill people unless we do something about it.
Deaths linked to extreme heat on hottest days soar
Between 2018 and 2022, London had the highest mortality risk from hot weather of 29°C (84°F) or more, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics. The figures overall show a dramatic increase on the previous year. …
Commenting on the ONS report, the head of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Climate Change and Health Unit, Dr. Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, said it was “extremely concerning”.
He described heat-related deaths as “one of the biggest public health challenges we face as populations get older”. …
“What we need is political leaders around the world that have the long-term vision to make the case for the investment, which we know will save money, we know will bring more jobs, we know it will save lives, and it will also solve the climate crisis,” he added.”
Conclusion: the ‘climate crisis’ is killing people.
The extent of these ‘extremes’ is rather too emphatically summed up in a four minute video by the Guardian, which shows floods, fires and disasters one after the next, continuously. The video is entitled: ‘Climate crisis: what one month of extreme weather looks like.‘
Conclusion: the ‘climate crisis’ is killing people.
Readers of the Daily Sceptic are, of course, well aware that this recurring hysteria is based on highly selective evidence. In reality, considered evaluation is required to place individual weather events in meaningful context. The same applies to other speculative efforts to link individual events with potential trends and causes.
The only sustainable conclusion for these issues, including Maddy’s sad demise, is that more information and analysis is needed before any testable conclusion can be reached.
The media’s representatives recognise this in one case, at least partly because they do not want even to consider or present the possibility that Covid vaccines played a role in Maddy’s death. Yet in other equally uncertain cases they shamelessly make sweeping assumptions.
In the YouTube ‘climate crisis’ video above, John Kerry states: “The climate crisis, my friends, is the test of our times.” Is it though?
We are constantly bombarded with unanalysed assumptions, often presented to us by people with obvious vested interests. Some years ago there was a variety of ways to challenge these assumptions. For example, decent journalists in serious publications would do this and these challenges would filter into the public consciousness. But this seems to happen less and less in the mainstream, where ‘experts’ are presented as authoritative voices on X or Y simply because they say they are, or have a prestigious title, and it is impossible to challenge them directly.
The failure to think deeply, the abandonment of reason, the rush to the preferred conclusion, the desire – even the need these days – to go along with the majority view without questioning it – these are symptoms of a cultural descent into myth, superstition and collective madness. The truth is what we want it to be and what our ‘experts’ say it is and that’s all you need to know.
I submit that this abject thoughtlessness – not ‘the climate crisis’ – is the real ‘test of our times’.
Dr. David Seedhouse is Honorary Professor of Deliberative Practice at Aston University and the creator of Our Decision Too, a free website of participatory democracy which welcomes new members.
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