Month: September 2020

Boris the Red Says That Climate Action Cannot Be A Victim of Covid

But we can apparently, The economy can. Children can. Jobs can. Lives can. Mental health can. Cancer and heart patients etc. can. Civil liberties can. All will be victims as the country faces a further 6 months of socially and economically catastrophic restrictions and Christmas is cancelled – but climate action must go right ahead, according to Chairman Johnson. Are we seeing this now? #ZeroCovid (a madcap, fanatical, destructive policy which the government has now formally adopted, dispelling any notion whatsoever that lockdowns are to ‘save the NHS’ or ‘flatten the curve’) is entry-level #Netzero. #NetZero is lockdown forever.

Lest I’m accused of being a ‘Covid denier’ or conspiracy theorist, let me make it clear: SARS-CoV-2 is a real virus and Covid-19 has killed many thousands of people but, it is nowhere near as serious a threat to public health as the government has made it out to be in the last 6 months, thus justifying unprecedented and extremely damaging measures to supposedly control its spread and ‘save lives’. Don’t believe me? That’s your choice, but it is irrefutable that Whitty and Vallance lied to the public when explaining the so called threat still posed by this disease. One of many, many lies, ommissions and distortions by government and government scientific advisers over the last 6 months, I might add.

I seriously recommend you read the entire thread. It is damning. Anyone who believes in evidence-based science should be horrified by the current turn of events. But we all know of course that the stock-in-trade of climate change ‘science’ is not so much evidence-based science but science-based construction of evidence to fit a prevailing consensus narrative. So the Two Ronnies of Covid Armageddon are not so very different from the Manns and the Hayhoes of Climate Armageddon. All willing to lie in order to promote a doom-laden narrative poorly evidenced in actual science and empirical data.

The tactics employed by the critics of those scientists and sceptics who oppose the official narrative are very similar also. Professor Francois Balloux signed a letter penned by Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Karol Sikora, urging the government to reconsider its Covid strategy. He was then promptly accused of being duped into signing what amounts to a supposed ‘right wing conspiracy’ which is lobbying for a supposedly “fringe pseudoscience” ‘herd immunity’ strategy. Heneghan, Gupta and Sikora are artificially classed as a “fringe group of scientists” allied to right wing lobbyists who are in opposition to consensus scientific opinion. Nothing could be further from the truth but the tactic will be nauseatingly familiar to followers of the debate on man-made climate change.

But to return to the subject of lockdowns and how they might be opportunistically being used to prepare the ground for more stringent climate action, there is a wealth of evidence to support that view now, with much talk of a ‘green recovery’, ‘great reset’ etc. plus real action on the ground with government proposing to bring forward the ban on petrol and diesel cars to 2030 and councils busily prioritising cycling at the expense of road traffic, following government ‘social distancing’ and ‘Covid-friendly’ Road Traffic Act amendments.

In point of fact, some people are positively salivating at the prospect of extending the concept of Covid lockdowns to ‘climate lockdowns’:

LONDON (Project Syndicate)—As COVID-19 spread earlier this year, governments introduced lockdowns in order to prevent a public-health emergency from spinning out of control. In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again—this time to tackle a climate emergency.

Shifting Arctic ice, raging wildfires in western U.S. states and elsewhere, and methane leaks in the North Sea are all warning signs that we are approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions.

Now Boris the Red has come right out and said that climate action is basically at the top of the government’s agenda, following its deliberate destruction of the economy and the trashing of civil liberties. Getting ‘back to normal’ is definitely not on the agenda.

The prime minister will tell a meeting hosted by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres that climate action “cannot be another victim of coronavirus”.

He will urge leaders to “look ahead to how we will rebuild” after the pandemic and how to “build back better”.

Mr Johnson is expected to speak to leaders via video link.

His speech at Thursday’s UN Climate Action Roundtable is part of the preparations for a global climate conference the UK is hosting in partnership with Italy in Glasgow in November next year.

“Look ahead to how we will rebuild, and how we can seize the opportunity to build back better,” the prime minister will say.

“Let us be the leaders who secure the very health of the planet for our children, grandchildren and generations to come.”

He says he hopes the UK will serve as “a launch pad for a global green industrial revolution.”

He’s what Delingpole calls a melon: Green on the outside and Red on the inside. He’s definitely not true blue Conservative. I warned of this back in early February, even before he decided to nuke the economy to ‘Save the NHS’. I also pointed out that May – the architect of the regressive, socialist inspired net zero 2050 legislation – wasn’t either.

There’s no hope for the Tories. They have gone mad or they have collectively sold their souls to the Green Globalist Devil and no longer even pretend to govern in the national interest. They need to be consigned to history – fast.

But nobody listened. They voted Tory in their droves six months later and here we are today, with a Communist PM presiding over a broken country telling us that he’s now making climate change the top priority for any ‘recovery’ from the damage his government has inflicted.

The Covid Hockeystick and the Decline of Science

They wheeled in Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber yesterday in order to frighten the British nation once again into accepting hugely damaging restrictions upon their personal, professional and social lives in order to head off a ‘second wave’ which the blond mop-haired lunatic in charge says is ‘incoming’.

It was a cold and calculated exercise in disinformation and government propaganda, light on science, light on data, designed to conceal the actual rather less alarming truth from the public, in favour of painting an apocalyptic picture of Covid doom. Sound familiar? Of course it does. Climate ‘scientists’ and the alarmist main stream media have been doing this for years re. the so called ‘climate crisis’, more recently a task taken over with missionary zeal by Greta ‘How Dare You’ Thunberg and the unwashed, unhinged Stinking Rebellion.

James Delingpole compares the Glum Two’s effort to convince us of imminent Covid catastrophe with Mann’s Hockey Stick. To illustrate the likely growth of ‘cases’ (i.e. positive PCR tests), they came up with this really scary graph, which does look a lot like a hockey stick, but which they insisted was ‘not a prediction’ (knowing full well that the media would take it as exactly that):

Says Delingpole:

Apparently — at least according to Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Chief Science Adviser Patrick Vallance — if we’re not careful Britain will be in danger of nearly 50,000 new Chinese coronavirus by mid-October.

My suspicion is that — just like the discredited Hockey Stick chart invented by the dodgy professor Michael Mann — it is an artefact that has much more to do with propaganda than honest science.

The Hockey Stick was what is known in colloquial English as ‘bent as a nine bob note’ — or indeed ‘dodgy as fuck’. 

As climate sceptics, we know it all too well and we know the dodgy data and dubious science which went into crafting it, which is why Delingpole says:

It’s the reason why several of the most sceptical voices on Chinese coronavirus — for example, Peter Hitchens in the UK, Marc Morano and Tony Heller in the US, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones in Australia — also happen to be very outspoken climate sceptics.

For my money though, Whitty and Vallance’s absurd exponential growth graph is more reminiscent of the absurd projections of global temperature increase by 2100 according to the misleadingly named ‘business as usual’ RCP8.5 representative concentration pathway. The analogy is closer in that W & V are probably using some dodgy Ferguson derived epidemiological model to arrive at their ‘not a prediction’; climate scientists use dodgy climate models, dodgy parameterisations of natural processes and dodgy socio-economic models to arrive at their catastrophic ‘not a prediction’ rise in global mean surface temperature:

We’ve had this BS once, with the first lockdown, with absurd modeled projections of 510,000 deaths without mitigation, leading to Johnson shutting down the country for 3 weeks to ‘flatten the curve and save the NHS’, 3 weeks which turned into 6 months with a few reluctant easing of restrictions over the summer. Now we’re back to facing a second punishing 6 months of extra restrictions/lockdown to head off a ‘casedemic catastrophe’ which government boffins assure us will eventually translate into thousands of deaths if we don’t do something urgently. There are very few hospitalisations and deaths at the moment, so the government have had to fabricate the so called ‘incoming’ second wave with reference to what is happening in Spain and France and with reference to a supposedly worrying ‘acceleration’ of ‘cases’ in this country, 90% of which may be actual false positives.

On the subject of France and Spain, here is the actual rise in cases, in both countries, compared to W & V’s projected exponential rise. Spot the difference?

The lack of anything resembling real science and solid data in the Whitty and Vallance presentation is extremely worrying, given that Johnson will almost certainly use it to impose more hugely socially and economically damaging restrictions upon the nation over winter. What on earth happened to evidence-based science? It seems to have been rejected wholesale now for government lies, propaganda, distortion and disinformation. Michael Yeadon, a former professional colleague of Vallance, is bravely standing up for it though:

Pre-Enlightenment science indeed, which is now become post Enlightenment science, post normal science; you might even say Endarkenment science. We are headed into very dangerous territory if this hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo pseudoscience being used to radically alter our societies and erode our fundamntal civil rights is not robustly challenged, right now.

UK Covid Deaths

England Covid Hospitalisations
Cases Per 100k – Updated to September 23rd

Update on Spain. They have switched to a new case diagnostic now which eliminates non-infectious positives by capping the cycle threshold on the PCR test and just look what has happened. Oh dear, the casedemic is running rapidly out of steam. If the UK were to do this, I imagine we would get exactly the same result.

Update: 2 Oct:

Even with the huge increase in testing, even with the refusal to eliminate non-infections being picked up by a cycle threshold set way too high, positive tests are levelling off it appears and the chance of getting anywhere near 50,000 cases per day is virtually zero.

Here’s the ‘inevitable rise in deaths’ following that ‘second wave’:

Even allowing for a lag between being infected and being killed by this virus, it is blatantly obvious that ‘infections’ are not translating into deaths.

Update 3 Oct:

Final update to the Vallance and Whitty Covid casedemic hockeystick. It’s a total bust now and it is clear that it should never have been presented to the public as a plausible projection. Both of them should be sacked for misleading MPs and for deliberately and unnecessarily alarming the public.

Actual Cases vs. Whitty/Vallance Hockeystick