It can’t be easy promoting all the information to try and convince the public that there is a "climate emergency", so the BBC are sending one of their climate reporters on a six month course to bring him up to speed in countering all the arguments, like the ones on this website, which show that there is no emergency.
What a pity they don’t actually engage in debate with those who make these arguments. If their arguments were strong enough then it would make sense for them to do so. Read the details here:
In a new paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we, alongside colleagues from a diverse range of fields, investigate the prevalence and extent of censorship and self-censorship in science.
Measuring censorship in science is difficult. It’s fundamentally about capturing studies that were never published, statements that were never made, possibilities that went unexplored and debates that never ended up happening. However, social scientists have come up with some ways to quantify the extent of censorship in science and research.
For instance, statistical tests can evaluate “publication bias” – whether or not papers with findings tilting a specific way were systematically excluded from publication. Sometimes editors or reviewers may reject findings that don’t cut the preferred direction with the preferred magnitude. Other times, scholars “file drawer” their own papers that don’t deliver statistically significant results pointing in the “correct” direction because they assume (often rightly) that their study would be unable to find a home in a respectable journal or because the publication of these findings would come at a high reputational cost. Either way, the scientific literature ends up being distorted because evidence that cuts in the “wrong” direction is systematically suppressed.
Audit studies can provide further insight. Scholars submit identical papers but change things that should not matter (like the author’s name or institutional affiliation) or reverse the direction of the findings (leaving all else the same) to test for systematic variance in whether the papers are accepted or rejected and what kinds of comments the reviewers offer based on who the author is or what they find. Other studies collect data on all papers submitted to particular journals in specific fields to test for patterns in whose work gets accepted or rejected and why. This can uncover whether editors or reviewers are applying standards inconsistently that shut out perspectives in a biased way.
Additionally, databases from organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or PEN America track attempts to silence or punish scholars, alongside state policies or institutional rules that undermine academic freedom. These data can be analyzed to understand the prevalence of censorious behaviors, who partakes in them, who is targeted, how these behaviors vary across contexts, and what the trendlines look like over time.
Supplementing these behavioral measures, many polls and surveys ask academic stakeholders how they understand academic freedom, their experiences with being censored or observing censorship, the extent to which they self-censor (and about what), or their appetite for censoring others. These self-reports can provide additional context to the trends observed by other means – including and especially with respect to the question of why people engage in censorious behaviors.
One thing that muddies the waters, however, is that many scholars understand and declare themselves as victims of censorship when they have not, in fact, been censored.
For instance, rejection from a journal for legitimate reasons, such as poor scientific quality, is not censorship – although there could be censorship at play if the standards reviewers and editors hold papers to varies systematically depending on what authors find and which narratives the paper helps advance.
Likewise, it’s not censorship if your work, upon publication, is widely trashed or ignored. No one is entitled to a positive reception.
Granted, peer responses to a paper may be unfair or a product of unfortunate biases. A hostile response to particular findings may dissuade other scholars from publishing similar results. And the reception of published work can have career implications for scholars: well-received works can be career enhancing, while poorly-received works have the opposite effect. Nonetheless, there is no censorship at play unless one’s scholarship is prevented from publication, or there are campaigns post-publication to punish the author for their study (through formal or informal channels) or have the work retracted or suppressed.
Work ignored upon publication has not been censored either. The overwhelming majority of published research receives few reads, even fewer citations (especially if we exclude self-citations), and makes no meaningful impact on the world. This is the outcome people should generally expect for their scholarship, for better or for worse. If someone experiences the modal result for their published work (it gets ignored), this should not be assumed to be a product of unjust bias. And even where there is “dissemination bias” at play (systematic variance in whether papers are read, shared, cited or receive media coverage based on whether they advance or undermine a particular narrative), this is an importantly different problem from censorship.
Likewise, it’s not censorship if scholars engage others in mocking, disrespectful or uncharitable ways and are generally greeted with hostility in turn. There are many “crybullies” in the culture war space who characterize reasonable pushback to their own aggressive behaviors as political persecution.
Nor is it censorship if scholars advocate for a particular position while violating academic rules and norms and these violations result in censure. Such punishments could approach censorship if standards are enforced inconsistently. It would likewise be censorious for people to try to dig up dirt on the author of a publication they disliked to have them punished for ostensibly unrelated offenses, or to have spurious investigations launched to make their lives miserable.
It is also necessary to distinguish between self-censorship that arises from real and highly costly threats versus self-censorship driven by cowardice or inaccurate information. Often there is plenty of room for people to dissent from prevailing views without significant adverse consequences, but scholars refuse to speak out regardless because they because they misperceive the magnitude or likelihood of sanction, or because they are unwilling to incur even mild risks to speak their minds (although we often compare ourselves to the likes of Galileo, in fact, higher ed may have unusually high concentrations of cowards, conformists and careerists). These aren’t instances of censorship where other people are the problem. The problem in these cases is largely in the mind of the self-censor.
By carefully working through the best available data on censorship in science, sifting genuine cases of suppression from culture war chaff, some general patterns emerge.
One of the most striking patterns is how often censorship is driven by scientists themselves.
Typically, when people think or talk about censorship we imagine external authorities (like governments or corporations), or perhaps campus administrators or overzealous students. We often understand censors to be driven by ignorance, ideological authoritarianism, or a desire to suppress findings that are inconvenient for someone’s political project or bottom line.
In fact, censorship and self-censorship seem to be most typically driven by prosocial motives. Sometimes scholars self-censor or suppress findings because they worry that claims will be easily misunderstood or misused. Sometimes they self-censor and instruct their advisees to do the same out of a desire to avoid creating difficulties for their colleagues and students. Sometimes findings seem dangerous or unflattering to populations that are already stigmatized, vulnerable or otherwise disadvantaged, and scientists suppress findings out of a desire to avoid making their situation worse (although, in practice, censorship often ends up having the most dramatic and pernicious effects on these very populations).
Critically, it isn’t just censorship that works this way. Many other academic problems tend to be driven by prosocial motives as well.
As psychologist Stuart Ritchie demonstrates in Science Fictions (Metropolitan Books, 2020), academics who commit fraud often seem genuinely convinced that the narratives advanced by their papers are, in fact, true. Fraud is often motivated, in part, by a desire to amplify what scientists believe to be the truth when their experiments fail to provide the expected confirmatory data. In other cases, scholars are convinced that a new treatment or intervention can help people, but they feel like they need eye-popping results to draw attention or secure funding for it – leading them to either massage the data or overhype their findings.
And as Lawrence Lessing shows in America, Compromised (University of Chicago Press, 2018), it is often scholars who are sincerely committed to honesty and rigor who end up being corrupted – and it is precisely their high sense of integrity that often blinds people to the ways they end up compromising their work.
This is precisely what makes many problems with the state of science difficult to address. They often aren’t caused by bad scientists driven by evil motives but by researchers trying to do the right thing in ways that ultimately undermine the scientific enterprise.
To reduce censorship and self-censorship, it’s not enough to create robust protections for academic freedom. We must also convince scientists to use those freedoms to follow the truth wherever it leads and to tell the truth even when doing so seems to conflict with other priorities.
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
Except for the lying and obfuscation that most of us have come to expect, I’ve mostly been left to reiterate that polar bears are not “canaries in the coal mine” indicators of climate change and to point out that Arctic sea ice extent and polar bear survival are not inextricably tied. For example, in some specific areas of interest, like Western Hudson Bay, there has not been a consistent decline in sea ice over the last few decades and bears are not attacking people at increased rates because they are desperately hungry. In other areas, like the Svalbard area of the western Barents Sea, sea ice has declined dramatically in recent years yet polar bears have not been attacking people more than usual.
Contradictions and failed predictions abound.
All in all, a rather boring year for the anticipated implosion of polar bear health and survival, despite my constant tracking of publicly-available information. That said, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all again for your continued support, and especially those who have donated hard-earned cash over the last few months: your support makes it possible for me to continue my work keeping polar bear science honest. Together, we have made a difference and I know it’s worth the fight. Because if we let evidence-based science die without challenge, we lose our ability to make sense of the world.
Also according to NOAA researchers, primary productivity in 2023 continued to be higher than 2003 across the Arctic, with increased values especially in the Barents Sea and Hudson Bay which ultimately benefits polar bears with more seals to eat:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pushed several aggressive climate regulations in 2023 that could seriously harm the American economy, energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The agency proposed or finalized rules that would spur the electric vehicle (EV) transition, decrease power grid reliability by imposing costly restrictions on power plants, tighten air quality standards and more in 2023. Under the Biden administration, the EPA has made considerable efforts to further regulations that would nominally help to counter climate change, often at the expense of the American economy, energy policy experts told the DCNF.
“The EPA took a disturbing trend to a new level in 2023: a willingness to use its regulatory power to kill off industries, dictate or influence what businesses can operate and limit what goods and services are available to the public,” Daren Bakst, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, told the DCNF. “Congress never envisioned the agency’s authorized regulatory power would be used as a tool for the agency to engage in central planning, reshape industries and limit consumer choice.” (RELATED: EPA Bureaucrats Can Rake In Six-Figure Salaries While Mostly Working From Home, Report Finds)
The “Clean Power Plan 2.0″
The EPA’s May proposal to slash greenhouse gas emissions from power plants would require fossil fuel-fired generation facilities to adopt expensive developing technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and hydrogen blending, in order to come into compliance over the coming decades. If finalized in its current form, the regulations— which the EPA contends are legal under the auspices of the Clean Air Act— would significantly raise the chances of blackouts in a massive swath of the Midwest while imposing costs to stakeholders totaling nearly $250 billion, according to analysis conducted by the Center of the American Experiment (CAE).
Power the Future, an energy advocacy organization, dubbed the proposal the “Clean Power Plan 2.0” in a November report because of its strong resemblance to the Obama administration’s “Clean Power Plan” proposal, which the Supreme Court struck down in its landmark decision in West Virginia v. EPAin 2022.
The EPA is moving forward with the proposal, despite the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and a key official for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission warning that the premature retirement of fossil fuel-fired baseload generation and increased reliance on intermittent green energy, like wind and solar, threatens future grid reliability.
“The proposed rule does not require that plants go offline,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF in August. “The proposed rule would require plants to install proven technology to abate greenhouse gas emissions. The proposal provides owners and operators of power plants with ample lead time and substantial compliance flexibilities, allowing power companies and grid operators to make sound long-term planning and investment decisions, and supporting the power sector’s ability to continue delivering reliable and affordable electricity.”
However, CAE and one of its leading grid experts, Isaac Orr, are not convinced.
The agency “does not appear to have the expertise necessary to enact such a sweeping regulation on the American power sector,” CAE wrote in its August comments in response to the agency’s proposal.
“This is the regulatory equivalent of studying the structural integrity of the top floor of a 100-story building without doing so for the preceding 99 floors,” Orr told the DCNF.
Tailpipe Emissions Standards
In April, the agency unveiled its proposal for new tailpipe emissions standards in an effort to curb emissions attributable to transportation. The proposed standards would be historically stringent if finalized and they would effectively mandate that 67% of all light-duty vehicles sold after model year 2032 are EVs, according to the EPA.
Under the proposed rules, 46% of medium-duty vehicle sales and 25% of heavy-duty sales will be EVs, according to the agency’s projections.
The proposal could be “tremendously damaging for the American people,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, told the DCNF. “The reason the agency is pushing these rules is because Congress would never pass these as laws … this rule would be very damaging for Americans and get rid of an iconic means of transportation.”
The administration has spentbillions to facilitate its ambitious EV push, and other agencies, such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, have promulgated their own similar rules as well. Despite these efforts, the American EV market is on tenuous footing: consumer demand is not growing as rapidly as anticipated, companies are losing large sums of money on their EV product lines, auto executives are starting to back away from short-term EV production targets and the nation’s EV charging infrastructure remains inconsistent and unevenly distributed across the country.
Notably, the House passed a bill that would effectively nullify the proposal earlier in December by a bipartisan vote, but it is unlikely to make it through the Senate, and the White House has suggested that President Joe Biden will veto the bill if it lands on his desk, according to The Hill.
Fine Particulate Pollution Standards
In January, the EPA proposed to tighten the existing National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for fine particulate pollution (PM 2.5) in order “to better protect communities, including those most overburdened by pollution,” the agency announced in a press release.
More than 70 industrial executives penned a letter to White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients warning him that it could lead to massive swaths of the nation falling out of compliance with the rule, which would in turn choke economic development and complicate key goals of Biden’s own green industrial agenda, according to its text.
The states that would be most directly impacted by a finalized PM 2.5 NAAQS update would be Texas, California, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Illinois, according to the letter’s text.
“PM 2.5 is the most demonstrable science fraud going on at the EPA,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, previously told the DCNF. “There is more than enough scientific research to demonstrate that what EPA is doing here is fraud, and it is really a testament to the corruption of the scientific community.”
If finalized, the proposal would kill jobs and put the EPA in a position to deny local economies the right to develop, because states that can not comply with the tightened standards would have to receive approval from the agency to develop new industrial factories and power facilities, Milloy told the DCNF.
The EPA projects that the policy would generate up to $43 billion in net health benefits in 2032, as well as prevent 4,200 premature deaths per year and restore 270,000 lost workdays per year by reducing the current standard of allowable fine particle pollution by up to 25%.
Waters of the United States
In January, the agency proposed a regulation that would define the “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the EPA’s regulatory purview as “navigable waters” to include lands containing small streams and wetlands. A federal court blocked the January proposal in April, finding that the 24 states that sued the agency had “persuasively shown that the new 2023 Rule poses a threat to their sovereign rights and amounts to irreparable harm.”
Then, in May, the Supreme Court limited the EPA’s authority under the Clean Water Act — which it had cited as the enabling statute for the January proposal — in its decision in Sackett v. EPA, a case brought by a couple whom the EPA tried to stop from constructing a house on their land in Idaho.
In August, the agency “finalized amendments to its January rule, which are just a half-hearted and incomplete set of corrections to try and fix the flawed rule,” Bakst told the DCNF. “These amendments don’t properly comply with the Sackett opinion and fail to provide needed clarity to implement the opinion. And they did so without seeking public comment.”
The EPA exhibited a “complete disregard for private property owners and the rule of law” in its proceedings pursuant to WOTUS regulation in 2023, Bakst told the DCNF.
Neither the EPA nor the White House responded immediately to a request for comment.
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Iowa Climate Science Education 