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By Jo Nova
Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The […]
Image by Donna Kirby from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
University degrees aren’t what they used to be
After years of universities turning out smug self-obsessed graduates of Woke ideology, Big Business has realized they might be better off hiring people with experience in the real world instead. They are also doing their own testing — with 2 out of 3 setting their own test assignments for candidates.
This year more than half of the 800 employers surveyed had already dropped bachelor degree requirements for at least some of their roles. It must have worked out, because next year almost all of those same companies plan on dropping the requirement for even more roles. That looks like a trend…
This surely must be ringing some warning bells in a few Ivory Towers? Fewer students, means less income, less influence, and fewer alumni:
How the college degree lost its value: Nearly half of US companies plan to ax Bachelor’s degree requirements – after Walmart, Accenture and IBM led the charge
DailyMail
Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor’s degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed.
By Jo Nova
A new paper tries to clean up the chicken entrail decrees of Mark Lynas (and earlier of John Cook) and concludes that their methodology is so bad, a 99.85% consensus could just as easily have been 32%.
All the papers in between 32 and 99% were neutral on the cause of man-made climate catastrophes, but Lynas et al bundled them in with the believer pack and made hay in the global media. This was even though many of the “neutral” papers showed results that didn’t fit the consensus. But who cares about results eh? If an abstract was neutral, it was therefore a “sign” the authors believed — like reading their tea leaves, or laying out the entrails. (Either that or it was a sign scientists who question the dogma get sacked, lose funding, and get uninvited to laboratory barbeques, but, shh! We won’t mention that.) So Lynas assumes that as long as a scientist doesn’t specifically say they disagree, they de facto endorse the “consensus”.
Why do people who call themselves scientists even talk about a “consensus”?
Obviously if believers had evidence, they’d talk about that instead.
Dentelski et al do an admirable job of pointing […]
The Guardian via Climate Depot
By Jo Nova
Lets meld climate and health into one giant government quasi religion. What could possibly go wrong?
The medical industry leapt into politics and medical witchcraft on Saturday, calling to fuse human and planetary health into the one all-purpose emergency.
This is despite humans living longer now than they’ve ever lived, eating more food than they ever have, and being less likely to die in storms, floods and cyclones.
Climate disasters are less costly, less deadly | Graph — Global death rate from disasters last century, per capita. Our World in Data. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser.
This is despite a truckload of papers on 74 million people showing 6 to 20 times as many people die in cold times rather than warm ones. Rather than being dangerous, global warming saves 160,000 lives a year. All over the world, people die in winter more than summer, year after year. Even in hot cities like Brisbane, cold weeks are the killers, not the hot ones. Room temperature is linked to mortality, and there’s no heatwave on Earth that can’t be solved with more air conditioning. Give the poor and downtrodden […]
Photo by Toby Elliott on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
We need to know: Can We Stop Volcanoes with Solar Panels?
Quick set up a summit. Give me a grant. Climate Change causes more rain (except when it causes more drought), and apparently the weight of “up to” four meters of monsoon rainfall can compress a crustal plate leading to earthquakes.
Now, four meters of rain means a lot to a pitiful 1.8 meter homo sapiens, but it’s hard to believe a plate of rock 30 kilometers thick would care less or even notice. It’s all absurd.
The whole article, written by a “Reader in Physical Geography” at Coventry Uni makes out the climate change is all around us, but unwittingly depends on the idea that the Sun is just a big torch shining on Earth, and not a raging nuclear magnetic dynamo 300,000 times bigger than the planet, blasting us with charged particles at a million miles an hour and with a magnetic field that stretches past Pluto. Poor Dr Blackett with his 20 years of university education was never taught about the Sun. He has a pretty graph pointing out some correlation between earthquakes and monsoons but […]
By Jo Nova
Apparently some New Zealand officials are toying with a whole new science curriculum which sounds like a return to the stone age. All the hard stuff about electromagnetism, elements, mass, motion, and molecular bonding has been replaced with UN Agenda 21 items like climate change and biodiversity.
Who needs to know the periodic table when you can learn the new religion of “Climate Change”? Knowing actual physics and chemistry will just hold you back in your drive to understand the intersectional suffering of the oppressed swamp antechinus.
NZ Teachers Shocked Physics, Chemistry, Biology Missing From New Science Curriculum
By Rebecca Zhu, Epoch Times
New Zealand science teachers have raised alarm over an early draft science curriculum, which lacks any mention of physics, chemistry, and biology.
Mr. Johnston [senior fellow of the New Zealand Initiative think tank] warned that if this draft went through, high school graduates wanting to pursue studies in physical sciences or engineering would need to be taught from scratch by their university.
Who is Mr Johnston kidding? As if universities will fight for the physical sciences… they didn’t even fight for “male and female”. Academics are driving this […]
By Jo Nova
Peer Review has been a sixty year experiment with no control group
It’s touted as the “gold standard” of science, yet the evidence shows Peer Review is an abject failure.
There are 30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year, and the only thing we know for sure is that two-thirds of papers with major flaws will still get published, fraud is almost never discovered, and peer review has effectively crushed groundbreaking new discoveries.
By Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History
The rise and fall of Peer Review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, instead it was just rubber stamp to keep the bureaucrats safe. As government funded research took over the world of science after World War […]
By Jo Nova
When the formerly esteemed journal Nature endorsed one side of politics in 2020, apparently it didn’t change any votes, but about a third of Trump supporters decided the science it published was politically biased too. The loss of trust in Nature was so strong that it tarnished the whole field of US science. (Zhang et al)
There goes the public faith in peer reviewed “Experts”.
“Trump supporters who had been shown the summary of Nature’s editorial were less likely to trust Nature’s information on COVID-19, and also reported more mistrust in US scientists.”
Being actively political meant 154 years of scientific reputation disappeared just like that. In the graph below presumably* naive Trump supporters ranked Nature as mostly “informed” (marked in orange, of course). The Trump supporters who saw the political endorsement (marked in red) suddenly, apparently saw Nature as more of a partisan rag than an impartial reporter of scientific truth.
@Nature says: In 2020, Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the US presidential election. A survey finds that viewing the endorsement did not change people’s views of the candidates, but caused some to lose confidence in Nature and in US scientists generally.*
[…]
By Jo Nova
Imagine if the national postal service had secret blacklists of people whose mail “should be lost”?
What if the FBI, CIA, or Department of Defence was talking to the postie, and the postie read your letters and threw some out, but not others, and none of the institutions told you they were doing this? Or perhaps the post-office told you point-blank you were banned from sending mail now “because your letters were wrong”.
In this case the “posties” are private organizations, but to all intents and purposes, their network connection and obedience to Big-Government made them, in effect, another branch of the government. The government wasn’t paying the postie direct, but it protected the monopoly of the corporate postie team and gave them a legal loophole to hide in, and the media outlets stopped anyone criticizing the government. It was a Pravda-KGB consortium with filters that worked at light speed, but hidden.
“Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.”
Where would we be if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter?
In the latest round of Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi shows how Twitter was not just censoring things that would later turn […]
Easy Money Begats Easy Billionaires, who build Easy Foundations, which are easily captured. And before you know it, the apolitical becomes political, and the political becomes a lobbying machine. Big Money becomes Huge Money and Huge Money wields power.
And a perfectly good civilization goes to waste.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
How Charity Foundations Damage Western Societies
by John Smoke, im1776
by Freestocks-photos
Charities are as large as the entire University sector.
Charitable foundations, and the specific charities they fund, are the single most important force in modern Western societies. They complete a triumvirate of the “journalism plus academia” shorthand of the Cathedral as Curtis Yarvin sees it. The amount of money sloshing around these organisations is simply mind-boggling. The latter is hard to reliably quantify, but in the UK, the charity ‘industry’ apparently registered £45 billion in revenues in 2021 alone. Compare this to the £40.5 billion total income in the UK higher education sector a couple of years ago and you get the idea.
John Smoke adroitly connects the dots and draws the spiral vortex that draws most charities in.
It starts so gently:
Imagine a billionaire. He’s an […]
Nature and Elsevier are agog and aghast that hundreds of junk papers filled with random word salad have been published in their esteemed journals.
It’s as bad as it sounds — one retracted title was: “‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’. “
They are shocked that scammers who were “organised” and “sophisticated” found tricks to get published — wait for it — not just by hyping up, adjusting and exaggerating their cherry-picked papers and incompetent models, but with nothing more than fake e-mails “with ‘univ’ instead of ‘uni’ and ‘-ac.uk’ instead of ‘.ac.uk’”. That’s right, the highest and most intellectual “peer review” journals in the world have such inadequate, nonexistent standards, that not only do they fail to weed out weak papers, they couldn’t even defend themselves against randomized nonsense coming from fake professors with dodgy emails.
In other words, no one who matters even reads the papers before they are published.
Indeed, no one even read the titles…
Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published
Nature
Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for […]
The new Climate Consensus is just a junk keyword survey.
Climate change is a branch of science that’s immature, complex, and has error bars a hundred miles wide. If 99% of scientists say the same thing, it’s a cult, not a science. The climate is not man-made but the irrelevant consensus surely is.
By studying words in industry publications, Mark Lynas thinks he’s discovered a scientific truth. Instead he has just shown that skeptics get purged from peer review. It’s official now, 99% of peer reviewed articles have to say they believe in order to get published.
He thought he was doing climate science but instead he studied sociology. If Mark Lynas proved anything it’s that he doesn’t know what science is, and only unskeptical papers pass peer review. It’s a sad sad statement about the state of the scientific-industry.
Hypothetically, if we cared at all about unscientific opinion-polling of climate scientists, we’d just opinion-poll them. He could run up a survey and email it out. It’d still be a fallacy, but at least it would tell us what scientists thought. Instead, Mark Lynas and co have taken a long roundabout route to poll them by proxy. It’s the oddly […]
James Cook University won a Pyrrhic victory at the High Court today. By spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars (how many exactly?), all they have proven is that we can’t trust any research done by that university.
Even if the professors there are being sincere and honest, we will never know whether they are only telling us what their Vice Chancellor, Supreme Ruler Sandra Harding, wants them to say. The government should not be funding this sort of institution. It serves its administration, not the Australian taxpayer.
Two years ago, JCU had already spent $600,000 to make sure all their staff know they can’t criticize the uni.
Peter Ridd was JCU’s best asset until they sacked him. He helped expose manipulated photos of reef fish by a JCU researcher, Oona Lönnstedt, who had already been caught fabricating data in Sweden. Yet JCU “investigated” and sacked Ridd faster than it investigated her suspicious lionfish shots.
Every JCU employee’s work is tainted by this. We will never know what any JCU researcher really thinks, or which results were dropped in the bin, no matter what they say, because we know employees of JCU will be afraid to report bad behaviour, fraud, […]
Even the former Head of MI-6 was warned to say nothing about the origins of Covid. The Swamp is so deep, and the corruption or infiltration of the West is so complete, that even at the highest levels in both government advice and in science, people were being censored.
Notice how the collectivists have changed the meaning of the word “conspiracy”. How do we discuss “a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.” when even the word we most want to use is now used as a namecalling label, the implies the user is delusional. The derision is now automatically assumed. Who does that serve?
Even Sharri Markson uses the term “conspiracy” with the new definition.
Our language is being destroyed. Gradually key words are weaponised against free thinkers.
….
The paper by Piplani et al (including Professor Petrosky) that was repeatedly rejected without the paper even being looked at. The authors expected a very different response when they submitted it. Normally, this kind of topical controversial paper would have been accepted quickly by journals wanting to grab the limelight and headlines.
It was eventually published in Nature in 2021. The paper showed that SARS-2 […]
Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for ten years and he has just quit in protest.
Peter Boghossian
He fought against Woke ideology. He helped write hoax papers to expose how meaningless peer review is and exposed students to politically incorrect speakers to hone their powers of reasoning. For that he has been subject to extraordinary vilification, inquisitions, and a campaign of disruption. His students were interviewed to find instances of “discrimination” and the investigators even asked them if they knew anything about him “beating his wife and children”, fueling rumors that he was a violent misogynist. He was given no right of reply. It’s character assassination by any means possible. The University did nothing to stop it.
Even petty methods were used to silence and intimidate him. Fire alarms interrupted an interview, bags of faeces were delivered, and speaker wires were pulled out during a live panel discussion. This reminds me of stories of how the Chinese Communist Party targets dissidents overseas with petty disruptions like having minions bang pots and pans in alleys to wake them in the dead of night.
It’s almost like the CCP runs the universities of the West.
My […]
A postmodern coal-powered Cockatoo is larger, meaner and nastier than any bird photographed in the paleolithic. | Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash
It’s a new horror to scare the kiddies:
Animals ‘shape-shifting’ as climate warms: study
Paris: Some animals are “shape-shifting” and have developed bigger tails, beaks and ears to regulate their body temperatures as the planet warms, according to a new study.
The Australian parrot, for example, had shown an average 4-10 per cent increase in the size of its bill since 1871 and the authors said this positively correlated with the summer temperature each year.
For one, do bird-bills cool birds? For two, how many parrot bills were measured in 1871 in Australia and do we think we would know if their bills got 10% bigger? For three, there is no “Australian parrot”, there are 56 different species. And fourthly, even if they had got bigger, and we could measure that, which we probably can’t, how do we know it’s not due to “something else” that changed in the last 150 years, like all the orchards, crops, trees and other things we planted? According to some botanists, there are more foreign plants […]
What is informed consent if your doctor is not allowed to inform you?
Even if Dr Oosterhuis is allowed to keep his license after being grilled today, the NSW Medical Board will have succeeded in scaring many doctors into silence. If our medical agencies were corrupt, the first people to point that out would be doctors who could speak freely. The gross overreaction of the NSW Medical Board tells us all that they don’t have solid evidence, and they might be covering up either their incompetence or something worse.
What are they hiding?
NSW Medical Board to grill anti-vax doctor
The Australian
A Sydney doctor has been hauled before the NSW Medical Board after he questioned evidence behind Covid-19 vaccines and promoted unapproved treatments, including Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, in a case that will test the limits of what medical professionals can say publicly.
Anaesthetist Paul Oosterhuis, who has practised in NSW’s public hospital system for more than 30 years, will front the board at a hearing on Friday, where he could be stripped of his licence after he made Facebook posts more than two weeks ago.
“AHPRA has said you can only […]
Tony Thomas has been reading academic papers so you don’t have to. Dr Blanche Verlie at the Uni of Sydney explores “the affective geographies of eco-anxiety” and seems to help create victims to study at the same time. A good business model maybe, but at the expense of mental health.
The more young people suffer, the more useful they are as political activists:
Getting Kids’ Climate Misery Just Right
Tony Thomas, Quadrant
Dr Blanche Verlie,Uni Sydney
Verlie correctly concedes that “climate anxiety can intersect with and contribute to clinically diagnosable mental illness” born of “hopelessness, disillusionment or apathy”. But she explains helpfully (if I might paraphrase) that the more kids suffer the better chance they’ll become green activists. In her own words,
climate anxiety is not an illness or disorder, but an appropriate and even valuable source of discomfort that can provide an important lens to help people re-evaluate what is important to them and find meaningful ways to inhabit the world. Education’s remit for cultivating critical thinking and empowerment thus makes it an exciting realm for supporting young people to contribute to what Verlie (2019a) [she is speaking of herself in […]
Lithuania, 1955
There are almost no brave people left in academia, or sport, or the land of celebrity. When one of their own faces the axe for some random transgression of an invisible rule book on political niceties, their colleagues abandon them.
In academia, they’re supposed to be the intellectual cream of the crop –the individual giants who fought their way to the top. But it’s like we’ve selected for wary herding people instead. And perhaps that’s the point. When universities were turned into schools and businesses, and quirky philanthropist funding became predictable Big-Government largess, the mavericks and rebels didn’t fit and one by one were expelled, sacked — or just pushed sideways til they fell out. What’s left in the wasteland of academia, apparently, are the mid-wit networking climbers. The middling Ordinaires rose into positions above their due and became afraid of losing the sweeter deal than they deserved. If they were the top dogs in their field, and if that mattered, they could speak their mind, get sacked, and still be offered a new position at a competing institution. But second rung players don’t have that option. They won’t put their head above the parapet and […]
Current Witchdoctor Warning: Severe levels of Voodoo likely on all channels
Climate Fear Week is Here.
Your car exhaust causes bushfires, your roast beef leads to droughts and the wrong lightglobes could flood the nation.
Hurry, hurry, it’s your absolute last last-chance after the last last-chance to save the world. According to an unaudited, unaccountable UN committee, It’s Code Red for Humanity! Rush and install Solar Special Protection Shields on your home today to be sure no one inside is at higher risk of Malaria, Asthma, Obesity, Eco-depression, and to save Nemo from feeling reckless. (Why haven’t you done that already, you evil reef killer?)
Despite installing more renewables than any nation per capita on Earth, Australia is failing to cleanse the Earth of pollution. Likewise the USA and UK which have both reduced actual carbon emissions by more than nearly everyone else are only leaders when they vote for socialists. Too many windmills are never enough! (Don’t mention the eagles or the whales, but praise the Sharks, for they are the sacred spirit of Virtue Signalling.)
There are many things you can do to play your part to make the weather nicer for our grandchildren, or at least reinforce […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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