The Wrong Experts

15 January 2024

Lots of people still believe lockdowns were necessary. They still believe that lockdowns saved lives, and were a crucial part of Government intervention that has kept us alive through two years of the COVID scam. They believe politicians and “experts” who claim that the only way to “stay safe” is to hide away in your homes and await your Government injections while many of those politicians and experts partied, visited mistresses and castles and had a jolly good time at the public’s expense.

There were some of us that understood that lockdowns were and still are a very bad idea. But unless you were a State approved “expert”, or a Government minister your opinion was irrelevant. In fact worse than irrelevant, you were a spreader of harmful misinformation and needed censoring, or now in some countries you’re classed as a “domestic terrorist”.

If you’re a middle class activist protesting about Climate Change™ or some artificially hyped race-related incident then have at it. Burn buildings, cause deaths and destruction and so on, the media will praise you, Governments will praise you and philanthropists will fund you. If you are a normal working class person protesting the outrageous assaults on our freedoms and liberties for no good reason that were not backed by any actual evidence, well the media will demonise and smear you and Governments will create new laws to determine your legal right to freedom of assembly and your legal right to protest are suddenly illegal, and invoke “Emergency Powers” to cart you off to prison, freeze your bank accounts, invalidate all your insurances and even kill your pets.

There were real experts speaking out from day one about the anti-science approach used by Governments, based on ridiculous claims from the likes of Neil Ferguson and his infamous “computer modelling”. There has even been studies and analyses done for those “Science fans” out there, such as this one (mirror) published in January 2022 by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke hailing from The Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.

The findings of this meta-analysis were that “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects”, and by that the authors specifically mean POSITIVE public health effects, such as protecting health, improving health, quantifiably better health outcomes etc.

Unfortunately, even though the mere mention of the name “Johns Hopkins” is usually enough to make Science Disciples weak at the knees and instantly defer all thinking to the Holy Experts, this was the wrong set of findings and therefore the “fact checkers” went to work. Among the issues levelled at this study were the following…

1. The authors are economists, not “medical or public health researchers”. Apparently only those from the Approved Guild of Medical Researchers are allowed to check if 1 + 1 = 2 in an analysis of other Medical Research studies. This indicates there is a very real pandemic of The Wrong Experts Syndrome.
2. It is not a “peer-reviewed scientific study”. Apparently this study is without the argument from consensus, known as Argumentum ad populum which describes the so-called “peer-review” process that now controls what can and can not get published. Never mind that the very idea of progress in any field requires the potential to speak against the current paradigm.

If you’re thinking that the above approach, i.e. “stay in your lane” and “don’t disagree with your peers” version of “science” is How Things Should Be, the following article on the Science Alert website might interest you…

There is one small detail mentioned in the article that is omitted from that headline that rivals some of the Sunday Sport’s best efforts, which is this colossal death toll from “climate change” will allegedly take place over “the next century or so”, because Science.

According to Wikipedia, around 150,000 people die every day and there are 36,525 days in 100 years (or so). That number (150,000 per day) is likely to change, but let’s go with it for now because precision does not appear to be a prerequisite for Climate Science. That means, based on those numbers 5,478,750,000 people will die in the next century, give or take. Just under five and a half billion, and the claim by the “Experts” is about 18.25% of those deaths will be from “climate change”.

Let’s set aside the insanely Chicken Little-esque headline claim for a moment and see if this all measures up to the Official Standards, where only qualified experts in a field may express an opinion or dare to tackle the topic in a formal paper, and if everyone weighing in here (i.e the “peers”) agree with each other. We can start with this bit…

As with most predictions for the future, this one is based on several assumptions.

One is a rough rule of thumb called the ‘1000-ton rule’. Under this framework, every thousand tons of carbon that humanity burns is said to indirectly condemn a future person to death.

Looking further into the “assumption” cited here by the name of the “1000-ton-rule” takes us to another article on the Frontiers in Psychology website titled “The Human Cost of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Semi-Quantitative Prediction and the 1,000-Tonne Rule” by Richard Parncutt. As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve strayed out of the original lane, that of so-called “climate science” and into psychology, and looking at Richard Parncutt’s bio on the Frontiers site his credentialed area of psychology is as a “Music psychologist and Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Graz, Austria”. Granted it does mention an honorary degree in physics near the bottom, but that is an extremely broad topic, and it is clear Mr Parncutt’s specialist subject is as a music psychologist.

The irony here is that in his article there is a section titled “Use of Clear, Direct Language” which is all about how best to fearmonger about climate change, and yet the article contains the word “may” 53 times, almost all instances of which are along the lines of ‘x may happen’ or ‘x may be’, along with the word “could” 17 times performing a similar role, that of weasel words. The function of weasel words is aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said when in fact only a vague, ambiguous, or irrelevant claim has been communicated, and this paper is stuffed to the brim with them.

So what we have is an unconvincing paper written by someone who is not a credentialed member of the Guild of Climate Experts, but apparently that doesn’t seem to matter. Our original article on the Science Alert website appear to give this a free pass, not just ignoring this invasion of Climate Science by a music psychologist, but linking to it like it’s an authoritative source on the topic.

So we can see that the complaint that our economists are not “medical or public health researchers” shouldn’t really be a problem, as it doesn’t matter when musicologists wade into the climate debate, although already it should be obvious that Parncutt’s hysterical fear-porn laden article being in complete alignment with the Establishment is precisely the reason he gets to stroll through the open gates in the boundaries usually closed to anyone not evangelising the party line.

That being said, the next issue our economists faced was that their paper had not been “peer-reviewed”, as if that process magically turns anything into truth. One might be tempted to think that regardless of having passed the peer-review process or not, the paper is either correct, partially correct or entirely false. One might even be tempted to think that if a paper hasn’t undergone that process but is somehow out there in the public sphere, a better approach to discredit it would be to review it and point out where it is wrong, rather than bleat about the lack of peer-review which actually says nothing about the correctness of the paper.

This becomes yet more ridiculous when you realise that for almost every subject or field you can think of, you can find peer-reviewed papers that disagree, and looking back at the Science Alert article we can see they actually outline some of those disagreements on this topic, for example…

Some experts argue abnormal temperatures on their own may already claim as many as five million lives a year. Other estimates are much lower.

So “some experts”, but not all it seems. Sounds like a lack of consensus, right?

Some of the quotes from Parncutt and another author referred to as “energy specialist Joshua Pierce” are downright hilarious, such as…

Many of those who will die are already living as children in the Global South […] burning Carmichael coal will cause their future deaths with a high probability.

Really? People alive now will die? In the future? If you thought it couldn’t get more ridiculous, it’s worth noting for extra mirth that Parncutt’s article actually states “Historically, burning carbon has had a large positive effect on human life expectancy and quality of life”, something that is incontrovertibly self-evident, and yet this pseudoscientific doom-mongering with decades of failed predictions based on computer models that are evidence of nothing is somehow justification to reduce the very thing that has contributed so positively to human life.

As we can see, the “fact checker” brigade have no interest in facts, and even their stated reasons for why we should not believe this article or that paper is inconsistently applied, but when it is, it’s always in the same direction. Despite the near-infinite number of times the Establishment mouthpieces have been demonstrably wrong, the fact-checkers always, always side with them, for the simple reason that they are all part of the same machinery. The Wrong Experts will always be wrong according to them, even when they are provably right, because that is how State-sponsored censorship works.

The WEF meetup in Davos this month is all about “rebuilding trust”. Don’t take this as a prediction of the future, but the likelihood they are going to be focusing on tackling what they deem to be “mis/disinformation” seems pretty high.