Monthly Archives: January 2023

Conformity and Suppression: How Science Is Not “Done”

26 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by in Political Bias, Science

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I’m not terribly surprised to learn that scientific advancement has slowed over my lifetime. A recent study published in the journal Nature documented a secular decline in the frequency of “disruptive” or “breakthrough” scientific research across a range of fields. Research has become increasingly dominated by “incremental” findings, according to the authors. The graphic below tells a pretty dramatic story:

The index values used in the chart range “from 1 for the most disruptive to -1 for the least disruptive.” The methodology used to assign these values, which summarize academic papers as well as patents, produces a few oddities. Why, for example, does the tech revolution of the last 40 years create barely a blip in the technology index in the chart above? And why have tech research and social science research always been more “disruptive” than other fields of study?

Putting those questions aside, the Nature paper finds trends that are basically consistent across all fields. Apparently, systematic forces have led to declines in these measures of breakthrough scientific findings. The authors try to provide a few explanations as to the forces at play: fewer researchers, incrementalism, and a growing role of large-team research that induces conformity. But if research has become more incremental, that’s more accurately described as a manifestation of the disease, rather than a cause.

Conformity

Steven F. Hayward skewers the authors a little, and perhaps unfairly, stating a concern held by many skeptics of current scientific practices. Hayward says the paper:

“… avoids the most significant and obvious explanation with the myopia of Inspector Clouseau, which is the deadly confluence of ideology and the increasingly narrow conformism of academic specialties.”

Conformism in science is nothing new, and it has often interfered with the advancement of knowledge. The earliest cases of suppression of controversial science were motivated by religious doctrine, but challenges to almost any scientific “consensus” seem to be looked upon as heresy. Several early cases of suppression are discussed here. Matt Ridley has described the case of Mary Worley Montagu, who visited Ottoman Turkey in the early 1700s and witnessed the application of puss from smallpox blisters to small scratches on the skin of healthy subjects. The mild illness this induced led to immunity, but the British medical establishment ridiculed her. A similar fate was suffered by a Boston physician in 1721. Ridley says:

“Conformity is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.”

When was the Scientific Boom?

I couldn’t agree more with Hayward and Ridley on the damaging effects of conformity. But what gave rise to our recent slide into scientific conformity, and when did it begin? The Nature study on disruptive science used data on papers and patents starting in 1945. The peak year for disruptive science within the data set was … 1945, but the index values were relatively high over the first two decades of the data set. Maybe those decades were very special for science, with a variety of applications and high-profile accomplishments that have gone unmatched since. As Scott Sumner says in an otherwise unrelated post, in many ways we’ve failed to live up to our own expectations:

“In retrospect, the 1950s seem like a pivotal decade. The Boeing 707, nuclear power plants, satellites orbiting Earth, glass walled skyscrapers, etc., all seemed radically different from the world of the 1890s. In contrast, airliners of the 2020s look roughly like the 707, we seem even less able to build nuclear power plants than in the 1960s, we seem to have a harder time getting back to the moon than going the first time, and we still build boring glass walled skyscrapers.”

It’s difficult to put the initial levels of the “disruptiveness” indices into historical context. We don’t know whether science was even more disruptive prior to 1945, or how the indices used by the authors of the Nature article would have captured it. And it’s impossible to say whether there is some “normal” level of disruptive research. Is a “normal” index value equal to zero, which we now approach as an asymptote?

Some incredible scientific breakthroughs occurred decades before 1945, to take Einstein’s theory of relativity as an obvious example. Perhaps the index value for physical sciences would have been much higher at that time, were it measured. Whether the immediate post-World War II era represented an all-time high in scientific disruption is anyone’s guess. Presumably, the world is always coming from a more primitive base of knowledge. Discoveries, however, usually lead to new and deeper questions. The authors of the Nature article acknowledge and attempt to test for the “burden” of a growing knowledge base on the productivity of subsequent research and find no effect. Nevertheless, it’s possible that the declining pattern after 1945 represents a natural decay following major “paradigm shifts” in the early twentieth century.

The Psychosis Now Known As “Wokeness”

The Nature study used papers and patents only through 2010. Therefore, the decline in disruptive science predates the revolution in “wokeness” we’ve seen over the past decade. But “wokeness” amounts to a radicalization of various doctrines that have been knocking around for years. The rise of social justice activism, critical theory, and anthropomorphic global warming theology all began long before the turn of the century and had far reaching effects that extended to the sciences. The recency of “wokeness” certainly doesn’t invalidate Hayward and Ridley when they note that ideology has a negative impact on research productivity. It’s likely, however, that some fields of study are relatively immune to the effects of politicization, such as the physical sciences. Surely other fields are more vulnerable, like the social sciences.

Citations: Not What They Used To Be?

There are other possible causes of the decline in disruptive science as measured by the Nature study, though the authors believe they’ve tested and found these explanations lacking. It’s possible that an increase in collaborative work led to a change in citation practices. For example, this study found that while self-citation has remained stable, citation of those within an author’s “collaboration network” has declined over time. Another paper identified a trend toward citing review articles in Ecology Journals rather than the research upon which those reviews were based, resulting in incorrect attribution of ideas and findings. That would directly reduce the measured “disruptiveness” of a given paper, but it’s not clear whether that trend extends to other fields.

Believe it or not, “citation politics” is a thing! It reflects the extent to which a researcher should suck-up to prominent authors in a field of study, or to anyone else who might be deemed potentially helpful or harmful. In a development that speaks volumes about trends in research productivity, authors are now urged to append a “Citation Diversity Statement” to their papers. Here’s an academic piece addressing the subject of “gendered citation practices” in contemporary physics. The 11 authors of this paper would do well to spend more time thinking about problems in physics than in obsessing about whether their world is “unfair”.

Science and the State

None of those other explanations are to disavow my strong feeling that science has been politicized and that it is harming our progress toward a better world. In fact, it usually leads us astray. Perhaps the most egregious example of politicized conformism today is climate science, though the health sciences went headlong toward a distinctly unhealthy conformism during the pandemic (and see this for a dark laugh).

Politicized science leads to both conformism and suppression. Here are several channels through which politicization might create these perverse tendencies and reduce research productivity or disruptiveness:

  • Political or agenda-driven research is driven by subjective criteria, rather than objective inquiry and even-handed empiricism
  • Research funding via private or public grants is often contingent upon whether the research can be expected to support the objectives of the funding NGOs, agencies, or regulators. The gravy train is reserved for those who support the “correct” scientific narrative
  • Promotion or tenure decisions may be sensitive to the political implications of research
  • Government agencies have been known to block access to databases funded by taxpayers when a scientist wishes to investigate the “wrong questions”
  • Journals and referees have political biases that may influence the acceptance of research submissions, which in turn influences the research itself
  • The favorability of coverage by a politicized media influences researchers, who are sensitive to the damage the media can do to one’s reputation
  • The influence of government agencies on media treatment of scientific discussion has proven to be a potent force
  • The chance that one’s research might have a public policy impact is heavily influenced by politics
  • The talent sought and/or attracted to various fields may be diminished by the primacy of political considerations. Indoctrinated young activists generally aren’t the material from which objective scientists are made

Conclusion

In fairness, there is a great deal of wonderful science being conducted these days, despite the claims appearing in the Nature piece and the politicized corruption undermining good science in certain fields. Tremendous breakthroughs are taking place in areas of medical research such as cancer immunotherapy and diabetes treatment. Fusion energy is inching closer to a reality. Space research is moving forward at a tremendous pace in both the public and private spheres, despite NASA’s clumsiness.

I’m sure there are several causes for the 70-year decline in scientific “disruptiveness” measured in the article in Nature. Part of that decline might have been a natural consequence of coming off an early twentieth-century burst of scientific breakthroughs. There might be other clues related to changes in citation practices. However, politicization has become a huge burden on scientific progress over the past decade. The most awful consequences of this trend include a huge misallocation of resources from industrial planning predicated on politicized science, and a meaningful loss of lives owing to the blind acceptance of draconian health policies during the Covid pandemic. When guided by the state or politics, what passes for science is often no better than scientism. There are, however, even in climate science and public health disciplines, many great scientists who continue to test and challenge the orthodoxy. We need more of them!

I leave you with a few words from President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in 1961, in which he foresaw issues related to the federal funding of scientific research:

“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Grow Or Collapse: Stasis Is Not a Long-Term Option

18 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by in Climate, Environment, Growth

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Growth is a human imperative and a good thing in every sense. We’ve long heard from naysayers, however, that growth will exhaust our finite resources, ending in starvation and the collapse of human civilization. They say, furthermore, that the end is nigh! It’s an old refrain. Thomas Malthus lent it credibility over 200 years ago (perhaps unintentionally), and we can pick on poor Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” thesis as a more modern starting point for this kind of hysteria. Lewis M. Andrews puts Ehrlich’s predictions in context:

“A year after the book’s publication, Ehrlich went on to say that this ‘utter breakdown’ in Earth’s capacity to support its bulging population was just fifteen years away. … For those of us still alive today, it is clear that nothing even approaching what Ehrlich predicted ever happened. Indeed, in the fifty-four years since his dire prophesy, those suffering from starvation have gone from one in four people on the planet to just one in ten, even as the world’s population has doubled.”

False Limits

The “limits” argument comes from the environmental Left, but it creates for them an uncomfortable tradeoff between limiting growth and the redistribution of a fixed (they hope) or shrinking (more likely) pie. That’s treacherous ground on which to build popular support. It’s also foolish to stake a long-term political agenda on baldly exaggerated claims (and see here) about the climate and resource constraints. Ultimately, people will recognize those ominous forecasts as manipulative propaganda.

Last year, an academic paper argued that growing civilizations must eventually reach a point of “asymptotic burnout” due to resource constraints, and must undergo a “homeostatic awakening”: no growth. The authors rely on a “superlinear scaling” argument based on cross-sectional data on cities, and they offer their “burnout” hypothesis as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox: the puzzling quiet we observe in the universe while we otherwise expect it to be teeming with life… civilizations reach their “awakenings” before finding ways to communicate with, or even detect, their distant neighbors. I addressed this point and it’s weaknesses last year, but here I mention it only to demonstrate that the “limits to growth” argument lives on in new incarnations.

Growth-limiting arguments are tenuous on at least three fundamental grounds: 1) failure to consider the ability of markets to respond to scarcity; 2) underestimating the potential of human ingenuity not only to adapt to challenges, but to invent new solutions, exploit new resources, and use existing resources more efficiently; and 3) homeostasis is impossible because zero growth cannot be achieved without destructive coercion, suspension of cooperative market mechanisms, and losses from non-market (i.e., political and non-political) competition for the fixed levels of societal wealth and production.

The zero-growth world is one that lacks opportunities and rewards for honest creation of value, whether through invention or simple, hard work. That value is determined through the interaction of buyers and sellers in markets, the most effective form of voluntary cooperation and social organization ever devised by mankind. Those preferring to take spoils through the political sphere, or who otherwise compete on the basis of force, either have little value to offer or simply lack the mindset to create value to exchange with others at arms length.

Zero-Growth Mentality

As Robert Colvile writes in a post called “The Morality of Growth”:

“A society without growth is not just politically far more fragile. It is hugely damaging to people’s lives – and in particular to the young, who will never get to benefit from the kind of compounding, increasing prosperity their parents enjoyed.”

Expanding on this theme is commenter Slocum at the Marginal Revolution site, where Colvile’s essay was linked:

“Humans behave poorly when they perceive that the pie is fixed or shrinking, and one of the main drivers for behaving poorly is feelings of envy coming to the forefront. The way we encourage people not to feel envy (and to act badly) is not to try to change human nature, or ‘nudge’ them, but rather to maintain a state of steady improvement so that they (naturally) don’t feel envious, jealous, tribal, xenophobic etc. Don’t create zero-sum economies and you won’t bring out the zero-sum thinking and all the ills that go with it.”

And again, this dynamic leads not to zero growth (if that’s desired), but to decay. Given the political instability to which negative growth can lead, collapse is a realistic possibility.

I liked Colville’s essay, but it probably should have been titled “The Immorality of Non-Growth”. It covers several contemporary obstacles to growth, including the rise of “stakeholder capitalism”, the growth of government at the expense of the private sector, strangling regulation, tax disincentives, NIMBYism, and the ease with which politicians engage in populist demagoguery in establishing policy. All those points have merit. But if his ultimate purpose was to shed light on the virtues of growth, it seems almost as if he lost his focus in examining only the flip side of the coin. I came away feeling like he didn’t expend much effort on the moral virtues of growth as he intended, though I found this nugget well said:

“It is striking that the fastest-growing societies also tend to be by far the most optimistic about their futures – because they can visibly see their lives getting better.”

Compound Growth

A far better discourse on growth’s virtues is offered by Veronique de Rugy in “The Greatness of Growth”. It should be obvious that growth is a potent tonic, but its range as a curative receives strangely little emphasis in popular discussion. First, de Rugy provides a simple illustration of the power of long-term growth, compound growth, in raising average living standards:

This is just a mechanical exercise, but it conveys the power of growth. At 2% real growth, real GDP per capital would double in 35 years and quadruple in 70 years. At 4% growth, real GDP would double in 18 years… less than a generation! It would quadruple in 35 years. If you’re just now starting a career, imagine nearing retirement at a standard of living four times as lavish as today’s senior employees (who make a lot more than you do now). We’ll talk a little more about how such growth rates might be achieved, but first, a little more on what growth can achieve.

The Rewards of Growth

Want to relieve poverty? There is no better and more permanent solution than economic growth. Here are some illustrations of this phenomenon:

Want to rein-in the federal budget deficit? Growth reduces the burden of the existing debt and shrinks fiscal deficits, though it might interfere with what little discipline spendthrift politicians currently face. We’ll have to find other fixes for that problem, but at least growth can insulate us from their profligacy.

And who can argue with the following?

“All the stuff an advocate anywhere on the political spectrum claims to value—good health, clean environment, safety, families and quality of life—depends on higher growth. …

There are other well-documented material consequences of modern economic growth, such as lower homicide rates, better health outcomes (babies born in the U.S. today are expected to live into their upper 70s, not their upper 30s as in 1860), increased leisure, more and better clothing and shelter, less food insecurity and so on.”

De Rugy argues convincingly that growth might well entail a greater boost in living standards for lower ranges of the socioeconomic spectrum than for the well-to-do. That would benefit not just those impoverished due to a lack of skills, but also those early in their careers as well as seniors attempting to earn extra income. For those with a legitimate need of a permanent safety net, growth allows society to be much more generous.

What de Rugy doesn’t mention is how growth can facilitate greater saving. In a truly virtuous cycle, saving is transformed into productivity-enhancing additions to the stock of capital. And not just physical capital, but human capital through investment in education as well. In addition, growth makes possible additional research and development, facilitating the kind of technical innovation that can sustain growth.

Getting Out of the Way of Growth

Later in de Rugy’s piece, she evaluates various ways to stimulate growth, including deregulation, wage and price flexibility, eliminating subsidies, less emphasis on redistribution, and simplifying the tax code. All these features of public policy are stultifying and involve dead-weight losses to society. That’s not to deny the benefits of adequate state capacity for providing true public goods and a legal and judicial system to protect individual rights. The issue of state capacity is a major impediment to growth in the less developed world, whereas countries in the developed world tend to have an excess of state “capacity”, which often runs amok!

In the U.S., our regulatory state imposes huge compliance costs on the private sector and effectively prohibits or destroys incentives for a great deal of productive (and harmless) activity. Interference with market pricing stunts growth by diverting resources from their most valued uses. Instead, it directs them toward uses that are favored by political elites and cronies. Subsidies do the same by distorting tradeoffs at a direct cost to taxpayers. Our system of income taxes is rife with behavioral distortions and compliance costs, bleeding otherwise productive gains into the coffers of accountants, tax attorneys, and bureaucrats. Finally, redistribution often entails the creation of disincentives, fostering a waste of human potential and a pathology of dependence.

Growth and Morality

Given the unequivocally positive consequences of growth to humanity, could the moral case for growth be any clearer? De Rugy quotes Benjamin Friedman’s “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth”:

“Growth is valuable not only for our material improvement but for how it affects our social attitudes and our political institutions—in other words, our society’s moral character, in the term favored by the Enlightenment thinkers from whom so many of our views on openness, tolerance and democracy have sprung.”

De Rugy also paraphrases Tyler Cowen’s position on growth from his book “Stubborn Attachments”:

“… economic growth, properly understood, should be an essential element of any ethical system that purports to care about universal human well-being. In other words, the benefits are so varied and important that nearly everyone should have a pro-growth program at or near the top of their agenda.”

Conclusion

Agitation for “degrowth” is often made in good faith by truly frightened people. Better education would help them, but our educational establishment has been corrupted by the same ignorant narrative. When it comes to rulers, the fearful are no less tyrannical than power-hungry authoritarians. In fact, fear can be instrumental in enabling that kind of transformation in the personalities of activists. A basic failing is their inability to recognize the many ways in which growth improves well-being, including the societal wealth to enable adaptation to changing conditions and the investment necessary to enhance our range of technological solutions for mitigating existential risks. Not least, however, is the failure of the zero-growth movement to understand the cruelty their position condones in exchange for their highly speculative assurances that we’ll all be better off if we just do as they say. A terrible downside will be unavoidable if and when growth is outlawed.

Cassandras Feel An Urgent Need To Crush Your Lifestyle

12 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by in Climate science, Environmental Fascism

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Appeals to reason and logic are worthless in dealing with fanatics, so it’s too bad that matters of public policy are so often subject to fanaticism. Nothing is more vulnerable on this scale than climate policy. Why else would anyone continue to listen to prognosticators of such distinguished failure as Paul Ehrlich? Perhaps most infamously, his 1970s forecasts of catastrophe due to population growth were spectacularly off-base. He’s a man without any real understanding of human behavior and how markets deal efficiently and sustainably with scarcity. Here’s a little more detail on his many misfires. And yet people believe him! That’s blind faith.

The foolish acceptance of chicken-little assertions leads to coercive and dangerous policy prescriptions. These are both unnecessary and very costly in direct and hidden ways. But we hear a frantic chorus that we’d better hurry or… we’re all gonna die! Ironically, the fate of the human race hardly matters to the most radical of the alarmists, who are concerned only that the Earth itself be in exactly the same natural state that prevailed circa 1800. People? They don’t belong here! One just can’t take this special group of fools too seriously, except that they seem to have some influence on an even more dangerous group of idiots called policymakers.

Judith Curry, an esteemed but contrarian climate expert, writes of the “faux urgency” of climate action, and how the rush to implement supposed climate mitigations is a threat to our future:

“Rapid deployment of wind and solar power has invariably increased electricity costs and reduced reliability, particularly with increasing penetration into the grid. Allegations of human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region, where global solar voltaic supplies are concentrated, are generating political conflicts that threaten the solar power industry. Global supply chains of materials needed to produce solar and wind energy plus battery storage are spawning new regional conflicts, logistical problems, supply shortages and rising costs. The large amount of land use required for wind and solar farms plus transmission lines is causing local land use conflicts in many regions.”

Curry also addresses the fact that international climate authorities have “moved the goalposts” in response to the realization that the so-called “crisis” is not nearly as severe as we were told not too long ago. And she has little patience for delusions that authorities can reliably force adjustments in human behavior so as to to reduce weather disasters:

“Looking back into the past, including paleoclimatic data, there has been more extreme weather [than today] everywhere on the planet. Thinking that we can minimize severe weather through using atmospheric carbon dioxide as a control knob is a fairy tale.”

The lengths to which interventionists are willing to go should make consumer/taxpayers break out their pitchforks. It’s absurd to entertain mandates forcing vehicles powered by internal combustion engines (ICEs) off the road, and automakers know it. Recently, the head of Toyota Motors acknowledged his doubts that electric vehicles (EVs) can meet our transportation demands any time soon:

“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority. That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly. Because the right answer is still unclear, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one option.”

In the same article, another Toyota executive says that neither the market nor the infrastructure is ready for a massive transition to EVs, a conclusion only a dimwit could doubt. Someone should call the Big 3 American car companies!

No one is a bigger cheerleader for EVs than Elon Musk. In the article about Toyota, he is quoted thusly:

“At this time, we actually need more oil and gas, not less. Realistically I think we need to use oil and gas in the short term, because otherwise civilization will crumble. One of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced is the transition to sustainable energy and to a sustainable economy. That will take some decades to complete.”

Of course, for the foreseeable future, EVs will be powered primarily by electricity generated from burning fossil fuels. So why the fuss? But as one wag said, that’s only until the government decides to shut down those power plants. After that, good luck with your EV!

Gas stoves are a new target of our energy overlords, but this can’t be about fuel efficiency, and it’s certainly not about the quality of food preparation. The claim by an environmental think tank called “Carbon-Free Buildings” is that gas stoves are responsible for dangerous indoor pollutants. Of course, the Left was quick to rally around this made-up problem, despite the fact that they all seem to use gas stoves and didn’t know anything about the issue until yesterday! And, they insist, racial minorities are hardest hit! Well, they might consider using exhaust fans, but the racialist rejoinder is that minorities aren’t adequately informed about the dangers and mitigants. Okay, start a safe-use info campaign, but keep government away from an embedded home technology that is arguably superior to the electric alternative in several respects.

Renewable energy mandates are a major area of assault. If we were to fully rely on today’s green energy technologies, we’d not just threaten our future, but our immediate health and welfare. Few people, including politicians, have any awareness of the low rates at which green technologies are actually utilized under real-world conditions.

“Worldwide average solar natural capacity factor (CF) reaches about ~11-13%. Best locations in California, Australia, South Africa, Sahara may have above 25%, but are rare. (see www.globalsolaratlas.info, setting direct normal solar irradiance)

Worldwide average wind natural capacity factors (CF) reach about ~21-24%. Best off-shore locations in Northern Europe may reach above 40%. Most of Asia and Africa have hardly any usable wind and the average CF would be below 15%, except for small areas on parts of the coasts of South Africa and Vietnam. (see www.globalwindatlas.info, setting mean power density)”

Those CFs are natural capacity factors (i.e., the wind doesn’t always blow or blow at “optimal” speeds, and the sun doesn’t always shine or shine at the best angle), The CFs don’t even account for “non-natural” shortfalls in actual utilization and other efficiency losses. It would be impossible for investors to make these technologies profitable without considerable assistance from taxpayers, but they couldn’t care less about whether their profits are driven by markets or government fiat. You see, they really aren’t capitalists. They are rent seekers playing a negative-sum game at the expense of the broader society.

There are severe environmental costs associated with current wind and solar technologies. Awful aesthetics and the huge inefficiencies of land use are bad enough. Then there are deadly consequences for wildlife. Producing inputs to these technologies requires resource-intensive and environmentally degrading mining activities. Finally, the costs of disposing of spent, toxic components of wind turbines and solar panels are conveniently ignored in most public discussions of renewables.

There is still more hypocritical frosting on the cake. Climate alarmists are largely opposed to nuclear power, a zero-carbon and very safe energy source. They also fight to prevent development of fossil fuel energy plant for impoverished peoples around the world, which would greatly aid in economic development efforts and in fostering better and safer living conditions. Apparently, they don’t care. Climate activists can only be counted upon to insist on wasteful and unreliable renewable energy facilities.

Before concluding, it’s good to review just a few facts about the “global climate”:

1) the warming we’ve seen in forecasts and in historical surface temperature data has been distorted by urban heat island effects, and weather instruments are too often situated in local environments rich in concrete and pavement.

2) Satellite temperatures are only available for the past 43 years, and they have to be calibrated to surface measurements, so they are not independent measures. But the trend in satellite temperatures over the past seven years has been flat or negative at a time when global carbon emissions are at all-time highs.

3) There have been a series of dramatic adjustments to historical data that have “cooled the past” relative to more recent temperatures.

4) The climate models producing catastrophic long-term forecasts of temperatures have proven to be biased to the high side, having drastically over-predicted temperature trends over the past two- to three decades.

5) Sea levels have been rising for thousands of years, and we’ve seen an additional mini-rebound since the mini-ice age of a few hundred years ago. Furthermore, the rate of increase in sea levels has not accelerated in recent decades, contrary to the claims of climate alarmists.

6) Storms and violent weather have shown no increase in frequency or severity, yet models assure us that they must!

Despite these facts, climate change fanatics will only hear of climate disaster. We should be unwilling to accept the climatological nonsense now passing for “settled science”, itself a notion at odds with the philosophy of science. I’m sad to say that climate researchers are often blinded by the incentives created by publication bias and grant money from power-hungry government bureaucracies and partisan NGOs. They are so blinded, in fact, that research within the climate establishment now almost completely ignores the role of other climatological drivers such as the solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and the role and behavior of atmospheric aerosols. Yes, only the global carbon dial seems to matter!

No one is more sympathetic to “the kids” than me, and I’m sad that so much of the “fan base” for climate action is dominated by frightened members of our most youthful generations. It’s hard to blame them, however. Their fanaticism has been inculcated by a distinctly non-scientific community of educators and journalists who are willing to accept outrageous assertions based on “toy models” concocted on weak empirical grounds. That’s not settled science. It’s settled propaganda.

Containing An Online Viper Pit of Antisemites

05 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by in Free Speech, Social Media

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This post is about a particular social media platform and a terrible oversight on my part. I signed up for Gab at least two years ago as I tried to find social media platforms that respected free speech rights and on which I could promote my blog. I haven’t paid for a subscription to “GabPro”, but I’m embarrassed to have completely missed some of the stink emanating from within the platform until recently. It’s not as if it hadn’t been reported, but somehow, I was oblivious.

I knew pretty quickly that Gab was an odd fit for me because so many posters there are on the very religious right. That’s fine, as I’m a strong believer in religious liberty and free speech. My views sometimes conflict with the religious right, but we’re in alignment on some key issues.

I never really scrolled Gab for more than a few moments at any time, having maintained my account there primarily for cross-posting my blog. I joined a particular Gab “fan” group of a band I love, and I have an old friend who happens to be on Gab. I also joined the “Libertarians of Gab” group. Occasionally, something raised my antennae right at the top of my feed, prompting me to look more closely, but I knew this much: like many other social media platforms, Gab is a meme-fest with lots of repetition, so I seldom wasted time scrolling there.

A year or so ago, a Jewish acquaintance on Gab mentioned a few antisemitic posts he’d seen there, but he’s a staunch free-speech advocate and had other reasons to stick with it. At the time, I might have begun to notice a few posters on Gab who were clearly anti-Zionist, but there’s a real distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Antisemites are bound to be anti-Zionist; the reverse doesn’t always follow. But again, I hadn’t yet found any real fault with Gab itself at that time.

(Note: I’m not hyphenating “antisemitism”, nor am I capitalizing “semitism”, because there is no such thing as a “semite” or “semitism”. The word was concocted by political factions in 19th century Germany in an attempt to “other” German Jews as “Orientals”.)

Over the next several months, however, at the top of my feed, I began to see a few antisemitic posts. Sometimes these amounted to silly assertions, such as the Rothschild family’s supposed world domination, a claim that would be harmless enough if not for indignation that the Rothschilds happen to be Jewish. A few posts were much worse. My knee-jerk reaction to offensive content is to block the poster, as I did a few times.

More recently, in the wake of Kanye West’s crazy tweets about Jews, I was a recipient of a group email from Andrew Torba, the founder and CEO of Gab. Torba, as it happens, is a self-styled “Christian Nationalist”. His email essentially portrayed West as a messenger from God. Here are some excerpts:

“God is using Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, for a big purpose…. He talks about the need for our leaders to uphold Christian values, not Zionist ones. … Ye is using the influence and talents that God has given him to speak the Truth and glorify Jesus Christ.”

It’s interesting that Torba referred to “Zionist” values. Though he is almost certainly anti-Zionist, that’s not really what he meant here. This bit of nut-jobbery, as I learned, had been preceded by many other wild statements from Torba over the years. For instance, over a year ago he tweeted the following and then disabled his Twitter account, a stunt he’s repeated several times:

“We’re building a parallel Christian society because we are fed up and done with the Judeo-Bolshevik one.”

The author at the link above, who reviewed some of Torba’s antics, noted that Judeo-Bolshevism was a term thrown around by the Nazis in the 1930s. But even putting that aside, Torba has an unfortunate tendency to paint with an extremely broad brush in promoting his very own brand of identity politics. That point is established clearly in this “Open Letter” to Torba from a “Hebraic-oriented evangelical Christian attorney”. If anything, the letter is far too gentle with Torba. The writer concludes:

“… I do hope you will reconsider your gratuitous exclusionary rhetoric regarding our spiritual cousins in the House of Judah, treating at least the many who share our cultural values and all-important Creationist paradigm with the same basic respect and camaraderie you show to atheists in the MAGA and conservative movements.”

Torba’s perspective seems to be that all Jews are unworthy, or worse. Here’s one of his posts:

From my perspective, Torba’s recent email regarding “Ye” served as a permission slip to antisemites on Gab to engage in blatant hatred of Jews. Since then, I’ve seen truly antisemitic content appear in my feed with increasing frequency, as if it’s being promoted by the platform. I’m not sure it always sinks to the level of brown-shirts on Kristallnach, but it has that nauseating flavor. Much to my dismay, a few of these posts were from users with whom I’d established earlier connections, or it was content they reposted. Others might have appeared on my feed courtesy of an effort to “introduce” users to one another and to promote certain content.

I didn’t save screenshots of the offensive posts I’ve seen on Gab. I probably should have, but here’s a sampling of a few of the wholesome users I’ve blocked:

One recent post expressed anger with so-called “elites”, an understandable sentiment shared by many in an age of corporatist fascism with the imposition of “woke” ideology in many institutions. However, the poster’s real point was to admonish others for not identifying the target of their anger as “the Jews”.

I became aware of another piece of disturbing information about the perpetrator of a mass killing in Pittsburgh a few years ago, and I can’t believe I missed it:

“The man accused of killing 11 Jews in the Tree of Life building posted antisemitic messages on Gab before the Oct. 27, 2018, massacre. In his Gab bio, he described Jews as the ‘children of satan.’”

Related to these murders, Torba reposted this article on Gab not long ago, from the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. It stated that Pennsylvania Representative Dan Frankel was the target of hateful and threatening posts on the platform. Some of the posts quoted at the link are awful.

But why did Torba repost that article? Well, it motivated a large number of Torba’s followers on Gab to subject the Chronicle to a series of antisemitic replies. This would appear to have been Torba’s intent, but he subsequently removed the repost of the article (along with the hateful replies). That’s a familiar pattern.

Torba’s original comments on the Chronicle article included the following:

“People are done caring about your eternal victimhood complex … Free speech means the right to offend…Stop conflating offensive memes with ‘threats’…Gab is what free speech looks like, the good, the bad, and the ugly are all included.”

Well, you’re right about free speech, Mr. Torba, but subject to an important qualification: “fighting words” are not protected speech under the Constitution. Maybe that’s why you took down your repost, and most importantly the replies. Did you come to your senses relative to the limits of free speech?

It’s not surprising, but the hatred on Gab is not reserved solely for Jews. Since I’ve been on the lookout, I’ve witnessed overt racism of several other varieties on Gab, and I’ve duly blocked those posters. There is also a complement of hatred for individuals falling under the LGBTQ+ banner.

Gab is not the only province of this sort of behavior on social media, but it might be a hotbed. Is it that easy to learn to hate others? Is the distinction between arguing policy versus revilement and ad hominem too subtle for them?

I have Jewish friends across the political spectrum and Jews in my extended family. Few of them are deeply religious. Likewise, many of my friends raised as Christians are not deeply religious. These individuals are entitled to the liberty to practice any or no religion at all. Their choices are no cause for hostility unless they make some effort to impose their views or will upon others. But that kind of theocratic, coercive power seems to be precisely what Andrew Torba and his Christian Nationalist followers on Gab wish to have for themselves.

I’m happy to report that I’ve seen far fewer offensive posts since blocking a number of antisemitic and racist posters. Maybe the platform is “learning” about me. However, there are many well-intentioned people on Gab, and even a few who actively call-out the bigots. I might have to join in that effort. I support Torba’s right to express his views, short of threats or incitement of violence. I have no desire to be affiliated with Torba, however, and I’ll never pay him for GabPro. I’ll remain on Gab for the time being, and we’ll see how the content evolves.