“The EU, and often its member states, doggedly follows the ‘precautionary principle’,” writes Matthew Lesh in CapX, blaming this principle for the suspension of the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine in various EU countries. But hang on a minute. Is this the same Matthew Lesh who has been an enthusiastic cheer leader for the British lockdowns? He goes on to say about this rationale for erring on the side of caution: “To pass the precautionary principle challenge requires doing the impossible: proving something is completely safe. Based on this logic, if stairs or pools were invented today they would be forbidden because of the risks of falling and drowning.”
Well quite. In case it’s escaped your attention, Matthew, this is precisely the argument that lockdown sceptics have been making for the past year. It was the rigid application of the precautionary principle that led governments across the world to lock their citizens in their homes last year because the dangers posed by SARS-CoV-2 were still largely unknown. Or, more precisely, it was the combination of the precautionary principle and short-termism that led to the embrace of the lockdown policy, with the priority of political leaders being to prevent immediate harm befalling their populations even if the excessive precautions they took ended up causing far greater harm in the long-term. And this, surely, is exactly the combination that’s behind the AstraZeneca ban in continental Europe. Better to avoid the immediate political fallout caused by a handful of adverse events apparently caused by the vaccine than provide their populations with lasting protection from infection.
If people like Matthew Lesh can see how disastrous the application of this principle is to the vaccine rollout, how can they not see how disastrous it was when applied to managing the pandemic last year? And, of course, it isn’t just Matthew, but vast numbers of pro-vaxxers who were gripped by the same panic European leaders are now gripped by this time last year.
The senior financial journalist who’s been a longtime contributor to Lockdown Sceptics had this to say about the double-standards of the lockdown zealots.
It’s half amusing to see commentators decrying the Europeans for the the misuse of the ‘precautionary principle’ when suspending the Astra-Zeneca vaccination (e.g. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writing in the Telegraph that the “French Precautionary Principle is literally killing Europe”. Also the Economist’s Health Correspondent said on BBC radio today that it is folly to apply the precautionary principle during a pandemic. But it is the same precautionary principle that was invoked 12 months ago to justify lockdowns in the first place – on the grounds that we didn’t know the covid infection fatality rate, its reproduction number and because hospitals might possibly be overwhelmed. The same precautionary principle was later invoked to justify two-metre social distancing, face masks, school closures, further lockdowns, etc. It seems that almost every day for 12 months we have had to endure some member of SAGE, notably Chris Whitty, appealing to the precautionary principle to justify some repressive measure unsupported by reliable data. Not only does the extreme risk aversion of the precautionary principle ignore costs (as LS has noted many times over the last year), but it returns to bite its advocates. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
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Good article. ‘Hide the expansion’. ‘Hide the Arctic is not doing much of anything when compared to historical data’.
So the recent cold spell is due to the melting Arctic which blah blah causes the changey thingy blah blah and makes it colder (please send money for further ‘research’).
Except the 1% global ice volume Arctic and Greenland Ice sheets (15%) are expanding or doing not much of anything if viewed historically. So how can a stable Arctic which is not melting cause cold snaps due to plant food as stated by the climate religion? And if the winter was mild like 2 winters ago then what is the answer?
The idiocy of the Klimat-tard cult boggles, along with their fascistic pursuit of money and power. No morality in the Gaia cults. $cience. Follow the Trillion$.
These tired old bones prefer warmth to cold. I do not consider it an improvement if the Arctic is getting colder. OK, sea level is still rising gently. If anyone complains that the sea will flood homes in 100 years, ask them how old their present dwelling is – invariably much less than that.
That’s also just nonsense. Large parts of the Netherlands and Belgium have been below sea-level ever since they came to be dry land at all due to human work (and pre-industrial technology) being put into making that happen. Where sea-levels are a problem, people build dikes. They’re common throughout all of the continental shore of the North Sea.
And yet………
Melting ice caps will enable China’s military forces to “reach into the Atlantic”, the Chief of the Defence Staff has warned.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/14/chinas-military-could-reach-atlantic-ice-caps-melt-warns-armed/
That’s good to know
. If we have time to worry about the Chinese navy once the polar ice caps have melted because of climate change, climate change in itself must be harmless.
Perhaps someone will tell some bloke called Radakin, chief of defence or the suchlike, with his alarmist statement the Chinese will be able to sail round the melting poles into the Atlantic. But then again just a bid for more defence spending to be blown on civil servants and undelivered projects
Probable a stupid question, but don’t the Chinese have nuclear powered submarines that can go under the ice?
Extrapolating 30 or 40 years of Arctic sea ice to try and explain 4 billion years of climate change on our planet is like looking at a bare patch of 1 square cm of my 5 acre farm, and calling it a desert, when it is actually an abundance of green.
The pushers of the climate con do not understand context, or else are truly corrupted by a financial motive (Al Gore et al).
Definitely the latter.
Motive is more about power and control, the financial element of course comes trotting after.
Another good trick is to adjust old temps down and new temps up, creating a scary slope. Then project to the moon.
https://realclimatescience.com/rewriting-the-climate-at-nasa/
I’m fairly certain this documentary from 2007 is the one I saw on channel 4 ( obv not BBC material! ) back in the day, and ever since then I’ve known that man-made global warming to be complete hogwash;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTq8-hnDeyk&ab_channel=ClaudeStrobbe
It wasn’t that long ago The Coming Ice Age: With Leonard Nimoy was worrying over an imminent ice age and how we could potentially halt it with black soot on the ice sheets, and whatever their data back then concluded that ice age was still possible after the industrial revolution was well established (and that thing that causes all the [supposed] warming) so they know there are many [other] factors at play.
Now they’re warning of the complete opposite whilst ignoring all these other factors? Just goes to show the data can be presented to fit any hypothesis, from one extreme to another. Granted they were wrong back then, but that doesn’t mean the opposite is true now (unless of course an ice age is still on the cards). Their fraudulent data might support a warming planet, given that mini-mini ice age was used as a convenient baseline but that doesn’t make the warming (even if there genuinely was any) man made or anything outside the norms either. Why is that period considered normal and today’s not normal?
Thank god they didn’t cover the ice with black soot! Imagine the total catastrophe that would have been. Honestly, when are these people going to understand that we live on something infinitely more complex, interrelated, and balanced than we could ever imagine and that tinkering with its mechanisms is the one thing that will cause the problems we are trying to avert! Better by by far to live in this magnificent place, be a part of it as we already are, and learn to dance with its changes and adapt in a creative, harmonious way than trying to play god at every shadow that looms.
Thanks for all the data and reporting. We Greenland polar bears are especially thankful that the truth about the ice pack and the melting — hah! — of our glaciers is being told by someone in the media who is not engaged in climate propaganda. — Grandpa Polar Bear https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BQ2B29GP
Spot on article. The fact that they hide the data is 100% correct and very sad. This website below used to be fantastic and had masses of historical surface area data about ice extent in both the Arctic and Antarctic, but now it only shows the daily satellite pictures (these seem to have stopped in Sept 2022) with no surface area data.
https://cryosphere.today
I know because I used to regularly monitor the site 20 years ago.
Confessions of a Computer Modeler
“Any model, including those predicting climate doom, can be tweaked to yield a desired result. I should know.”
After three iterations [of remodeling] I finally blurted out, “What number are you looking for?” He didn’t miss a beat: He told me that he needed to show $2 billion of benefits to get the program renewed.
I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy.
Was the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] official asking me to lie?
I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he believed in the value of continuing the program. (Congress ended the grants in 1990.)
Robert J. Caprara, “Confessions of a Computer Modeler,”
The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2014
https://www.wsj.com/articles/confessions-of-a-computer-modeler-1404861351
.
“There is something fascinating about science. On gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact”——Mark Twain. ——-But in those days scientists were actually indulging in a genuine search for truth. It would be interesting to see a quote from Mr.Twain about today’s Government funded data adjusters and their genuine search for anything that seems to support public policy and ignores everything that doesn’t
Chris I think your headline is a bit unfair. If scientists were hiding the data we wouldn’t have it available to us. Its mainstream media where most of the problem lies because they refuse to accurately report on what is actually happening if it doesn’t support the crazy net zero agenda. There must be scientists who see what is really happening and who would love to report it on TV but are never given the opportunity. People like Attenborough have lost any credibility they had with anybody who does any research on climate and he has become no more than a purveyor of a lying pile of political propaganda. He is either too old or too stupid or working to a political agenda to report things accurately and he has unlimited use of our TV licence fees to do it on the BBC. While this is the case many people watch his extortionately funded programs full of inaccurate or distorted data and believe the rubbish he spouts. Surely there must be somewhere, a UK TV station to take this crap on and set the record straight.