Scientific institutional activism

Wonks put out another air pollution propaganda piece. Other wonks say there's only three years left to save the planet.

I was on Ian Collins’ Talk TV show this afternoon, talking about two new very obvious political interventions from people calling themselves “scientists”. Watch it here…

The first report is from the Royal College of Physicians. In “A breath of fresh air: responding to the health challenges of modern air pollution”, fake researchers claim that “30,000 deaths per year in the UK are estimated to be attributed to air pollution, with an economic cost of £27 billion in the UK due to healthcare costs”.

This is exactly the same pseudoscientific propaganda as the claim that drove support for London Mayor, Sadiq Khan’s anti-car policies. You can read my Climate Debate UK/Together Association report on the bad science behind Khan’s claims that air pollution “kills" 4,000 people every year in London. As I show — scientists disagreed with that expression, because it’s just not true. It’s a statistical trick, and they said that expressing risk of exposure to air pollution in that way will mislead the public. And it did.

I am confident about taking on so many seemingly respectable scientists hailing from such prestigious institutions as a “layperson”, so to speak, and calling out their ideological bullshit for what it is because the scientific disagreement is on the record. We have raised the objections that scientists made to the alarmist rhetoric, and the institutions and the scientists had nothing to say in their defence. They have doubled down on their claims, and so they are simply lying.

You can read my first report — it’s in three parts — at the CDUK website here.

I produced another report about the politics of air pollution policies here. I argue that air pollution is a proxy battle of the climate war, and that the green blob’s grantors funded air pollution campaigns in order to overcome the climate policy agenda’s stalemate.

If I appear to be somewhat outspoken on this, it is because I find the ease with which “scientists” willingly ignore science and criticisms in order to support ideological causes utterly contemptible. It is very obviously about money, power and politics, not about science and public health. In the post-Covid world, that is inexcusable. If you want science to inform politics, and to defend institutional science, then you better get a move on. I don’t see how its credibility will survive this decade unless it changes radically.

The second report comes via the BBC (naturally):

Three years left to limit warming to 1.5C, leading scientists warn

The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions.

That's the stark warning from more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming.

Oh, pur-lease!! How many “stark warnings” and fake deadlines have been issued by these chancers?

In my conversation with Ian Collins, I mentioned one of the most infamous. In August 2008, a very silly man called Andrew Simms claimed that:

100 months from today we will reach a concentration of greenhouse gases at which it is no longer "likely" that we will stay below the 2C temperature rise threshold. "Likely" in this context refers to the definition of risk used by the IPCC. But, even just before that point, there is still a one third chance of crossing the line.

But the world outlasted the One Hundred Month campaign's website, which at some point in the 9 years since the 100 month deadline expired, was given up by Simms and his fellow idiot doomster “experts”, and is now being squatted. In fact, more than 100 months have passed since 100 months passed. We’re now at 204 months since the prognostication. And yet we are still here. (Most of us, anyway.)

It is very obviously very silly. And both reports are very obviously performances, not contributions to our understanding. I am beginning to wonder if science was ever populated by sensible people. If so, how was this decline possible? Perhaps it is the rest of us who overestimated it, and couldn’t see past the performances of these profoundly unserious people.