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In my not-yet-banned talk on the top five reasons Science is broken, I list as number two the Expansion Team Effect and the corruption of money. (Woke & DIE is first.)
Money swells and pushes into Science like a tsunami, forming pools which become the breeding grounds of scientists. The larger the pools, the more scientists are formed. There has been so much money forced into the system these last seventy years, you can now find a scientist to support just about any contention you want to push, and this is of course easier the more money and power you have to support it.
When the amounts of money become large enough they become a sort of proof that the areas of study are both legitimate and true. For one, because that money is funneled to discover scientists who support those areas. For two, the money itself is an argument, sort of like how journalists hang onto Bill Gates’s words. They hope, in some mysterious and vague way, that they’ll be the beneficiary of his largess.
It’s not that scientists come running with the herd because they hope to become rich. It’s because they, being human, naturally run with the herd, and herds have to find life-giving water (money) like everybody else.
Once the herd grows, it self-perpetuates. The size itself is all it takes to convinces others that all is well. Research, as it is called, bursts forth, and like the herd itself, the sheer massiveness of it is enough to convince others of its veracity.
Enter the serial herd leader The Lancet and their herd-reviewed “The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: health at the mercy of fossil fuels” by Marina Romanello and a herd of others.
This now-annual report is like the paper we looked at yesterday: advocacy masquerading as science. Here’s a quote from the opening:
Climate change is undermining every dimension of global health monitored, increasing the fragility of the global systems that health depends on, and increasing the vulnerability of populations to the coexisting geopolitical, energy, and cost-of-living crises.
It is not logically impossible that if the weather changes that every dimension of global health will be “undermined”, but it is absurd to say so. (A changing climate means nothing in itself; it’s the weather that counts; people experience weather, not climate.)
We’ve used this example before, humble as it is, but it is no less valuable for that. Every winter tens of thousands of northerners trek southward to Florida and Arizona. And they do this to gain tens of degrees of temperature. Not just a fraction or two of a degree as promised by global warming models, but tens of degrees.
Raw heat. And they do this for their health. If just increasing temperatures slightly was enough to be as deleterious to health as Lancet’s Experts would have it, we should find a huge increase in death rate as we moved from Green Bay to Tampa Bay. We do not.
Now how could such simple, easily verifiable, easily seen facts have been ignored by this herd of Experts?
Easy! Models. Which they were forbidden to question or doubt, because doing so makes one into a denier. These health Experts must accept the word of climate Experts, which means taking their climate models as is, without possibility of doubt. You will search for days, and search in vain, to find even a hint of a whisper of a rumor of a doubt.
The climate models then become input, usually directly but sometimes indirectly, into the health Experts’ models. And, of course, climate Experts will not, and must not, question these health models (with their wee p-values galore). Nor must any other Experts outside health and climate question them, either. Questioning just isn’t on in an expertocracy.
Naturally, what I call the multiplication Of uncertainties, is completely ignored. Think: the data that goes into both climate and health models has some uncertainty attached (more in the former case). This is ignored. The climate models have uncertainty. That is ignored. The models’ output is fed into health models as if it is perfect.
The end result should be a multiplication of uncertainties, such that there should not be much, if any, trust in the long string of modeling.
But, again, doubt is not allowed. Doubt is disloyal, you denier. The enormous mass of research becomes its own proof of its correctness. The whole becomes an Appeal To Swelling Bureaucracy, a fallacy, but a beloved one.
One example to prove my contention:
Insufficient climate change adaptation efforts have left health systems vulnerable to climate change-related health hazards. Only 48 of 95 countries have assessed their climate change adaptation needs (indicator 2.1.1) and only 63% of countries reported high to very high implementation status for health emergency management in 2021 (indicator 2.2.4). Increasing adaptation to climate change has the potential to simultaneously improve the capacity of health systems to manage both future infectious disease outbreaks and other health emergencies (indicator 2.3.1).
If that isn’t as pure a bureaucracy as you’ve seen, then you don’t know bureaucracy.
And just how easy it is to lie to oneself:
This is “Change in the percentage of people reporting moderate to severe food insecurity” because supposed warming. But food insecurity does not mean lack of food! Or lack of eating, or starvation, or anything like that.
It is a derived measure, not a real one; it is a model. It is only meant as proof of how bad things are known to be in the minds of researchers, when they can’t find actual bad things, like famines. So they make things like this up, to reassure themselves they are right.
Here’s the contrast, the actual corn production through time in major countries (the same signal is in rice, nuts, et cetera; see the link).
The model, which is “food insecurity”, becomes realer than Reality. The Deadly Sin of Reification has been committed.
And sworn to by a herd of scientists.
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Briggs writes:
“…..Every winter tens of thousands of northerners trek southward to Florida and Arizona. And they do this to gain tens of degrees of temperature. Not just a fraction or two of a degree as promised by global warming models, but tens of degrees.
“Raw heat. And they do this for their health. If just increasing temperatures slightly was enough to be as deleterious to health as Lancet’s Experts would have it, we should find a huge increase in death rate as we moved from Green Bay, to Tampa Bay. We do not.”
Exactly so. We “control” our climate, individually, by changing our location (“from Green Bay to Tampa Bay”), or by adjusting the thermostats in our homes, offices, and cars. This “climate control” is one of the fabulous benefits of modern life, due mostly to “fossil fuels”, and today we have a fuel that’s both clean and abundant: natural gas, and modern nuclear.
Alas, well-funded (or hoping to be) Experts™, many of them World Scientists™, want us to GIVE UP the ability to control our personal climate, because THEY are going to control the climate of the ENTIRE PLANET, ON OUR BEHALF. (Grandiose much?)
Go ahead and buy that “Smart Meter” so your betters can control your individual thermostat; go ahead and buy that EV, so your betters can restrict your movement. (Yes they can shut off these cars remotely if they wish.). Better hope your Social Credit Score keeps the heat on, and your Tesla charging. Careful now! Be a Good Citizen!
This is all hogwash to destroy the U.S. and western allies, funded by Russian and Chinese, (et al.) energy competitors, and aided by their allies in our own government.
It’s as plain as the soon-to-be-frostbitten nose on your face. By the way, how do these Experts™ and World Scientists™ think reducing our fertilizer and food supplies (which they are promoting) will help with “Food Insecurity”? Why do they never “model” the (entirely foreseeable) consequences of their “solutions”?
A clear and concise description of systemic corruption, and the corruption’s source:
“Money swells and pushes into Science like a tsunami, forming pools which become the breeding grounds of scientists. The larger the pools, the more scientists are formed. There has been so much money forced into the system these last seventy years, you can now find a scientist to support just about any contention you want to push, and this is of course easier the more money and power you have to support it.”
Funny money from a corrupt, private banking cartel. To fix the corruption in science first fix the corruption in finance.
“Climate change is undermining every dimension of global health . . .”
This is certainly true, if one includes the ‘cures’.
Another enterprise that has always made heavy use of experts and models is trial lawyering. Maybe there’s something to be learned lurking there? Hire competing experts to come to opposite conclusions, and let them duke it out in front of a jury?
How many hundreds of millions of people live within 1000 kilometers of the equator?
How many dozens of people live within 1000 kilometers of the poles?
‘Nuff said.
Milton, you may recall that Al Gore’s book, “An Inconvenient Truth”, WAS put on trial in Britain, when somebody (probably parents) sued the school system to stop them using it in their curriculum as a science textbook..
The Judge in that case found the book contained numerous demonstrable falsehoods and exaggerations, and ruled in the Plaintiff’s favor. The book was removed from the schools, or moved to the fiction section, but unfortunately not the falsehoods it contained, which took on a life of their own…. To the immense profit of Al Gore, Jr., who’s worth a couple hundred million now due to book sales and very lucrative “carbon capture” schemes and lecture fees.
Many “greenies” have enriched themselves at the expense of taxpayers, and I don’t think there’s a single large, publicly-funded solar installation, from Calif. to NY, that hasn’t gone bankrupt, while the CEOs walk away with full pockets.
In this and so much else, we taxpayers and citizens are victims of fraudulent inducement, committed upon us by our own government, in partnership with their multi-national corporate cronies, who then donate big to said politicians, while the corporate lobbyists have the pleasure of writing most of our 2,000+ page legislative bills. Rinse and repeat.
In the private sector, in a court of law, “fraudulent inducement” would void any contract, and leave the offending party owing damages and even doing jail time. Just think how many promises have been made in your own state, to entice taxpayers into expensive projects that almost always fail or have obscene cost overruns.
(Meanwhile the very basics of good government are shamefully neglected.)
“Human-caused” (anthropomorphic) GlobalClimateWarmingChange should absolutely, positively be put on nationally-televised trial; but what most especially should be put on trial, are their proposed “solutions”, which involve the effective destruction of our food and energy sectors. A little closer scrutiny, here, maybe, before shutting down those power-plants?
If you were a geo-political foe of the United States, out to win a war and conquer our nation, would you do anything differently than is being done by today’s Democrats?
The most basic problem is that you cannot get tenure without getting NSC or other grant monies – and the people who decide who deserves grant monies act mainly on social rather than scientific motivators.
Thus it is not the case that there is too much money chasing science, it is the case that the monies are generally mis-directed by incompetents protecting incompetence while cowering in fear the mobs their own acquiesence has created.
Imagine, for example, the mob reaction if a major journal were to publish lab work interpretable as establishing an experimental basis for the claim (which I believe most biome researchers now secretly accept) that women could easily and safely be vaccinated against producing gender confused children.
Again, the problem is neither one of too much money in science nor one of intentional pernicious influence – it is mainly one of cowardly and ill-informed pipers whose death grip on their own positions and perogatives is strangling the scientific process.
Mega-Corporate C-Suite Execs rely on the Big-League “External Consultants” (McKinsey, Bain, et. al) to produce reports on improving business operations. In truth, these “External Consultants” are retained to produce reports justifying policies which the execs are already determined to implement. Peer-Reviewed-Science (PRS) works in much the same way (most of the time). Its a closed and vicious parasitical circle/loop. “The Buck Stops Here” was a sign President Truman kept on his desk for a reason (to send a message).
Briggs, what are “indicator 2.1.1” etc. in the quote? Are these baked-in metrics from Agenda something-or-other or something spawned from same?
…still loving the blog, God Bless 🙂
gareth,
Those “indicators” are all in the paper, various bureaucratic-derived measures.
Briggs, by the miracle of an interwebs search, I found ’em:
“Lancet Countdown indicators”
“07/06/2022 Lancet Countdown benefits from new EU-funded project The Lancet Countdown celebrates the launch of a new project that will develop indicators which capture the links between climate change and health.”
“The Lancet Countdown works to ensure that health is at the centre of how governments understand and respond to climate change.”
https://www.lancetcountdown.org
Another example of the EU using the money that it extracts from its victims to fund organizations that lobby it for the outcome that the EU wants.
Oh, and here’s the report, including such insights as “The health costs of delayed decarbonisation”.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(22)00197-9/fulltext
Must take a lot of money having all those Experts experting away all the time 😉