Essay by Eric Worrall

As Britain endures extreme cold and near miss blackouts, apparently now is the right time for an English scientist to tell everyone how hot it is.

My new dark red climate stripe for 2024 shows it’s the hottest year yet

Published: January 10, 2025 10.00pm AEDT
Ed Hawkins
Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading

…

These “warming stripes”, adopted around the world as a symbol of climate awareness, action and ambition, have just been updated to include a new dark red stripe for 2024. It was a colour that I had to add for the first time last year when 2023 shattered the previous records.

No one experiences the global average temperature directly. But we can use the same approach to represent how we have lived through our own climate experience, locally. The UK had it’s fourth-warmest year on record. Other countries, such as Germany, had their warmest year on record.

…

Well done humanity. For it is us who have caused this rapid warming of the planet, and the devastating consequences for people and ecosystems that are so visible today and every day. Many extreme weather events have been made even worse by our reliance on burning fossil fuels, causing misery around the world.

…

Read more: https://theconversation.com/my-new-dark-red-climate-stripe-for-2024-shows-its-the-hottest-year-yet-246914

The article goes into all the bad things Ed Hawkins thinks global warming has caused, such as the Los Angeles fire. Strangely Ed forgot to include Britain’s current extreme cold snap in his list of climate disasters.

Given a choice between affordable home heating or climate action, I’m guessing most Brits right now would choose the affordable home heating option.

If an extreme cold snap with near zero wind and solar can occur at 1.5C global warming, it can obviously occur at 2C global warming or even 3C global warming. In fact, if Ed’s prediction of more extreme weather is correct, that could make cold snaps such as Britain is currently enduring more likely or more extreme.

Of course, given the failure of climate models to predict the current bump in global temperature, there are clearly substantial climate forcings which have not been captured by the models. So it is anyone’s guess where global temperature will go next.

Let us hope Britain doesn’t vote their way out of a survivable future, by embracing so much global warming action they all freeze to death. Because Britain’s ongoing effort to sabotage their own industrial competitiveness and energy affordability is having no impact on India and China’s determination to lift their people out of grinding poverty, by providing low cost fossil fuel electricity as quickly as they can build the coal plants.

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Noah Carl

Science, nominally the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, is at it again. In November, they published an editorial by Agustin Fuentes titled ‘Scientists as political advocates’. The gist is that scientists and scientific institutions need to be even more political than they already are.

Back in 2023, Fuentes wrote an editorial that claimed “being woke is just doing good 21st-century science”. And in 2021, he wrote one that described Charles Darwin as “an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices”. Indeed, the prolific Fuentes has penned no less than eight editorials for Science over the last four years – suggesting that the editors like what he’s selling.  

Returning to ‘Scientists as political advocates’, Fuentes begins by warning readers that science is “under attack”. Does he mean that it’s under attack from woke ideologues trying to bend science into a tool for promoting ‘diversity’? Or that it’s under attack from public health officials trying to shut down discussion over the harms of pandemic policies? Of course not. He means that it’s under attack from his political opponents.

Almost all the examples Fuentes gives involve accusations that some person or organisation on the political right is attacking science. He isn’t worried about attempts to redefine basic biological concepts like ‘sex’ or scientists being made the subjects of censorious petitions for opposing mask mandates. This isn’t to say that Fuentes’ examples don’t qualify as attacks – just that his presentation is so obviously one-sided and tendentious.

In the next paragraph, Fuentes manages to derive the conclusion that “science in many societies is political and always has been” by quoting a recent statement on “scientific responsibility” from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which incidentally publishes Science. I’m not convinced. Sure, scientists should act responsibly, just like everyone else. But this doesn’t mean that science as an institution is or should be political.

People like myself who oppose the politicisation of science aren’t saying that scientists should be free to act irresponsibly, or that they should be indifferent to “the interest of humanity” (Fuentes’ words) in their role as private citizens. We’re saying that science itself should be kept separate from politics, as prescribed by the four Mertonian norms:

1. Scientists must be judged on impersonal criteria. (No firing people for ‘racism’.)
2. They must share their data and results with one another. (No preventing access to datasets.)
3. They must seek to advance knowledge, not pursue personal or political goals. (No requiring people to promote ‘diversity’.)
4. And they must remain detached from the subject matter of their research. (No promoting feel-good dogmas.)

In the next paragraph, Fuentes reaffirms his woke credentials, complaining that “attacks are often especially intense when the scientists are also women, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), queer, or from other marginalized groups”. What he’s basically saying is that attacks on white male scientists are the least intense, which is more or less the opposite of the truth. Attacks on white male scientists tend to be the most intense precisely because such individuals rank lowest in the woke’s victimhood hierarchy. Have any black female scientists been the subject of a censorious petition signed by hundreds of their colleagues?

Fuentes proceeds to criticise the “idea that scientists must maintain an air of neutrality”, which, he claims, is “ethically problematic and practically detrimental” in the face of an “anti-science onslaught”. He seems to believe the only reason people aren’t on board with his political agenda is that too many scientists are laying low because they’re hung up on this whole neutrality thing. But scientists in many fields aren’t keeping quiet: they’re engaging in precisely the kind of activism that Fuentes wants. And in doing so, they’re contributing to the loss of public trust in science.

Fuentes’ call for super-charging the politicisation of science somehow isn’t very compelling. Traditional scientific values like neutrality and impartiality – they’re worth hanging on to.