Researcher says attempts to silence her have failed Polar bear numbers could easily exceed 40,000, up from a low point of 10,000 or fewer in the 1960s. In The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened, a book published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Dr Susan Crockford uses the latest data as well as…
via Watts Up With That?
March 19, 2019 at 04:36PM
According to this article in Scientific American The United States joined Saudi Arabia to derail a U.N. resolution that sought to improve the world’s understanding of potential efforts to lace the sky with sunlight-reflecting aerosols or use carbon-catching fans. The two countries were joined by Brazil in blocking the resolution at the U.N. Environment Assembly…
via Watts Up With That?
March 19, 2019 at 04:00PM
It’s time to call it: Democracies across the West are at an inflection point on free speech, and it’s not clear which way things will go on this issue in the next 20 or 30 years. In some cases, ostensibly liberal governments have already made moves to police and suppress what they deem unacceptable speech; in others, rigid political binaries have threatened to crowd out traditions of free inquiry and debate. All too often, it seems not to matter what is said in an argument but rather who says it and how it was said.
Superseding this once-proud tradition of free speech, empiricism, and free inquiry is calculating, cautious, self-censoring phraseology. And when people do express unorthodox views, it is often in hushed tones, out of fear that an overheard comment could kill their career and get them ostracized from polite society. A December 2018 Rasmussen Reports poll found that today only 26 percent of American adults believe they have true freedom of speech, while 68 percent think they have to be careful not to say something politically incorrect to avoid getting in trouble. In 1990 there were approximately 75 “hate speech” codes in place at U.S. colleges and universities; just one year later the number had swelled to more than 300 before spreading like a brushfire thereafter. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in 2018, 90 percent of American universities maintain at least one policy that either restricts protected speech or could easily be interpreted as doing so. Meanwhile in Europe, Germany unveiled in 2017 a new law, known locally as NetzDG, which included massive fines for social media networks that are insufficiently diligent in policing “hate speech” on their platforms. In 2018 Paris followed Berlin’s lead by toughening its laws on “hate speech” on social media. The same year a YouGov poll in the United Kingdom found that significantly more British voters (48 percent vs. 35 percent) believed that there were “many important issues these days where people are not allowed to say what they think.” Last but not least, a 2019 report to the Council of Europe concluded that European press freedom was more fragile today than at any time since the end of the Cold War, given the rise of attacks on and intimidation of journalists. In short, the abridgement of this most fundamental democratic freedom to speak one’s mind appears to have become the norm across the West, as though our elites and governments were rushing headlong down the road to a new dystopia. How did we get here?
For decades now, the freedom to speak and argue—the most fundamental right of a free people—has been under assault by neo-Marxist advocates of a “more just society.” But it is only recently that their efforts have succeeded in shutting down an ever-widening range of venues of public debate: first in academia, then in the media, and of late in politics. Today the fundamental right to free speech is under threat not just from speech codes—that is, from proscriptions on what cannot be said—but also increasingly from prescriptive rules about what one must say, as though perfunctory condemnations of Western history were the price of admission to public debate.
Why are societies in Europe and America seemingly intent on suppressing the fundamentally democratic impulses to speak freely, to err, to debate, and even to offend so that, through it all, we might come to learn what passes the common sense test and possibly arrive at a larger national consensus on policy? When did ideological allegiance (liberal vs. illiberal) become a litmus test for what constitutes appropriate public discourse? And how did we get to the point where political expressions of concern for the economic and social welfare of the nation’s own is “xenophobia,” and where the only praiseworthy use of American power is to unconditionally embrace globalization or save the planet by signing onto high-minded but ultimately unenforceable declarations of virtuous intent? Why is it that in Europe today the traditional generosity of its people is all but taken for granted, while that same citizenry’s desire to ensure its own welfare and security, and to transmit its cultural inheritance to the next generation, is often reviled as intolerance by the intelligentsia, politicians, and the media?
The roots of our growing unfreedom were planted in the late 1960s, but only today can we truly appreciate the extent to which the ideas of that era deconstructed our democratic culture. This latest neo-Marxist lurch toward unfreedom happened in the span of a single generation, the result of a cultural unmooring during which conservatives seem to have lost their sense of caution, and liberals their collective mind.
The post The Rise of Unfreedom in the West appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
March 19, 2019 at 04:00PM
March 19, 2019: ICSC (as an organization) and our Chief Science Advisor, Dr. Tim Ball (as an individual), have signed the open letter on climate security to President Trump coordinated by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The letter starts:
Dear President Trump,
The undersigned organizations and individuals write to express our strong support for the proposed President’s Commission on Climate Security. It is our understanding that this commission, which is being planned and would be directed by Dr. William Happer of the National Security Council staff, is currently being considered by your senior White House staff and relevant Cabinet secretaries and agency heads. The commission would consist of a small number of distinguished experts on climate-related science and national security. It would be charged with conducting an independent, high-level review of the Fourth National Climate Assessment and other official reports relating to climate and its implications for national security. Its deliberations would be subject to the transparency requirements of the Federal Advisory Committees Act.
In our view, an independent review of these reports is long overdue. Serious problems and shortcomings have been raised repeatedly in the past by highly-qualified scientists only to be ignored or dismissed by the federal agencies in charge of producing the reports.
Click here to read whole letter and the list of endorsing organizations and individuals.
via Welcome to the International Climate Science Coalition Web Site
March 19, 2019 at 03:23PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 