Faulty COVID, Climate Sciences Share Common Causes, Ignorance

Climate alarm-driven policies and the pandemic COVID-19 origin - arguably the two greatest scientific disasters in recent human history - are consequences of lamentably similar causes.

Can we also blame greedy subsidy-seeking corporations, political posturers claiming public good, and media pundits chasing clicks and eyeballls? Sure.

I’ve addressed all of them in numerous past articles and books, and I will likely do so many more times in the future.

But I’ll leave more discussions of those influencing agents for other days, and heretofore focus this commentary on communities we’re supposed to be able to trust.

I’m exclusively referring here to the professional scientists who are expected to report and operate upon the best available information, make reasoned judgments based upon solid analytical methods, state what is not known as well as what is, and welcome open inquiry that sometimes challenges orthodoxies.

This clearly has not been the case with regard to prevalent scientific cultures that rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” to cover all bases, and scorned skeptics of pending catastrophes as “deniers,” claiming a phony “consensus” to give their unsupportable assertions unwarranted gravitas.

As I have previously elaborated, there has never been anything remotely close to a credible study evidencing that most “climate scientists” believe there is a “consensus” supporting a human-caused emergency, or any emergency for that matter.

Whereas oceans have factually risen aooroximately 400 feet since the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago releasing water contained in glaciers covering much of the Northern Hemisphere, that rise has not accelerated since before the “Little Ice Age” (not a true ice age) which ended in the mid-1800s (before the Industrial Revolution created human smokestacks and SUVs).

Regarding those fears about rapidly rising sea levels, that simply isn’t happening. As natural warming continues in fits-and-starts, that rise has continued at the same 7 inches per century with no observed acceleration since accurate records have existed.

Nor is there any basis for numerous false claims — even by top government officials who must certainly know better — that the climate is causing severe weather to become more frequent or extreme. Anyone bothering to check official records would be aware of this nonsense.

Meanwhile, we have allowed such unwarranted alarmism to drive anti-fossil energy policies based upon hypothetical climate model projections that, as reported in the prestigious journal Nature, are running far too hot.

As NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Gavin Schmidt confessed: "It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this admission, that the models can’t be trusted as a policy instrument. ... You end up with numbers for even the near‐term that are insanely scary — and wrong.”

A recent Wall Street Journal Article by Tim Trevan, founder of Chrome Biorisk Management LLC, offered some similar pseudoscience related commentary regarding “why scientists got the COVID lab leak wrong” as is finally becoming entirely evident in reported U.S. Department of Energy and FBI findings.

Most particularly, the key question is why did “top scientific experts” — who suspected or knew otherwise — continue to push the false conclusion that the virus originated from natural evolution and first infected human populations in a Wuhan, China wet market?

Noting that scientists are human, and science has become a vested-interest industry, Trevan summarizes some influences that strongly conspire against rigorous investigations and objective, honest reporting:

• Dissonance … where everyone is the hero of their own story and see themselves as good people doing good things. The idea of admitting to bad scientific outcomes “creates a tension that the human brain abhors” and denial serves as a psychological defense.
• Social proof ... since scientists can’t be experts in everything, or even in all aspects of their immediate disciplines, they often tend to settle upon an established groupthink which makes it difficult to go against the prevailing orthodoxy.
• Self-selection ... people who choose the same profession tend to think about things similarly, often influencing a tendency toward conformation bias which favors views of others that match their own and ignores or discounts contrary evidence.
• In-group and out-group dynamics … when someone identifies with a group and an outsider attacks other members it often mobilizes a joint retaliatory defense ... such as when challenges to the Wuhan wet market theory were perceived as raising doubts about rigorous laboratory security and the field of virology in general.
• Cultural cognition … for the most part, people don’t form their views on complex social issues in isolation, but rather identify prominent people with whom they agree on issues that are most important to them and then also tend to adopt their views on other issues, consciously or subconsciously rejecting opposing perspectives and possibilities.
• Self Interest … scientists, like other professionals, care about competitive personal recognition and career progression, along with the role they play in advancing their profession as a whole.

All of this involves abilities to raise sponsorship money, upon which career prospects, laboratory funds, and entire scientific disciplines, depend.

Yes, scientists are people, and even wonderful people learn through trial-and-error mistakes.

But mistakes made through compromised objectivity — and their coverups — are fundamentally antithetical to good science, unworthy of public trust, and therefore undeserving of continued funding and policy influence.