From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Last month a group of scientists published a paper in Nature stating that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) had shown no decline in strength since the 1960s. Helped by publicity in the Daily Sceptic, the story went viral on social media, although it was largely ignored in narrative-driven mainstream publications. The collapse of the Gulf Stream, a key component of the AMOC, is an important ‘tipping point’ story used to induce mass climate psychosis and make it easier to impose the Net Zero fantasy on increasing resentful and questioning populations. Obviously, reinforcements to back up such an important weaponised scare needed to be rushed to the front and the BBC has risen to the challenge. The AMOC “appears to be getting weaker” state BBC activists Simon King and Mark Poynting. Their long article is a classic of its kind in trying to deflect scientific findings that blow holes in the ‘settled’ narrative.

In the Nature paper, three scientists working out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution stated that they came to their conclusion showing the stability of the AMOC after examining heat transfers between the sea and the atmosphere. It was noted that the AMOC had not weakened from 1963 to 2017, “although substantial variability exists at all latitudes”. This variability is the basis for much of the Gulf Stream fear-mongering. The BBC notes that the presence of larger grains of sediment on the ocean floor suggests the existence of stronger currents, pointing to a “cold blob” in the Atlantic that appears to have cooled of late. Thin pickings, it might be thought, to run an article titled ‘Could the UK actually get colder with global warming?’ The Woods Hole scientists note that records “are not long enough to differentiate between low frequency variability and long-term trends”.

The Nature story is not the only recent scientific finding that suggests the Day After Tomorrow alarm about the AMOC is a tad overdone. In 2023, Georgina Rannard of the BBC reported that “scientists say” a weakening Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025. There was no later reporting, needless to say, of subsequent work from a group of scientists at the US weather service NOAA that discovered the huge flow of Gulf Stream tropical water through the Florida Straits had remained “remarkably stable” for over 40 years.

Of course the BBC, along with most of the legacy media, has form as long as your arm when it comes to producing deflective copy seemingly designed to head off inconvenient scientific findings. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is the largest and best observed collection of tropical coral in the world. Any sign of ill health is a boon for green propogandists who argue that warming measured in tenths of a degree centigrade will destroy an organism that has survived for millions of years in temperatures between 24-32°C. For the last three years, coral on the GBR has hit recent record levels with scarcely a mention in mainstream media. Days before last year’s record was announced, the places where journalism goes to die were full of stories from a paper that conveniently noted climate change posed an “existential threat” to the reef. “The science tells us that the GBR is in danger and we should be guided by the science,” Professor Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong told Victoria Gill of BBC News. Professor McGregor’s statement was an opinion readily broadcast by the BBC, a courtesy that does not appear to have been extended to the fact that coral on the GBR was at its highest level since detailed observations began.

It beggars belief that the BBC and all its fellow alarmists can run this stuff with a straight face knowing that crucial scientific information is missing from their reports. Important findings from reputable sources emerge about the current stability of the Gulf Stream and the response is to blow more smoke around that raises wholly unnecessary fears.

The main concern is that the AMOC “could suddenly switch off”, state King and Poynting. To back up their statement and provide the inevitable political message they note the comment of Matthew England, Professor of Oceanography at the University of South Wales: “We’re playing a bit of a Russian roulette game. The more we stack up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the more we warm the system, the more chance we have of an AMOC slowdown and collapse.” Now look what you plebs have done with your steak chomping, gas-guzzling central heating and naff holidays in Benidorm, is an unpleasant subtext here.

Of course, keen and dedicated followers of climate alarmists will note a master craftsman at work. In 2023, aided by 35 million computer hours and using an improbable rise in temperature of up to 4°C in less than 80 years, Professor Matthews suggested that there was a dramatic slowdown in deep Antarctica ocean currents. Melting Antarctica ice could lead to a 40% slowdown in just 30 years. The fact that Antarctica has barely warmed in 70 years is ignored.

Who needs Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters when we have the BBC.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Francis Menton

It’s only two weeks into the new Trump administration, and we’re seeing an incredible sea change start in the federal government. In his first campaign, Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” and then when he took office he barely got started on the project during a full four year term. Maybe he was too distracted by constant investigations, lawfare, “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and the like. But this time it’s much different.

The big news of the past day or two is the beginning of purges at DOJ, the FBI, and USAID. Those thoroughly corrupt institutions are very good places to start in these early weeks. But they are barely the tip of the iceberg of corrupt institutions ripe for upending.

One place that is about to get hit by the whirlwind is academia. It is possible that the entire industry of academia will be revolutionized and transformed over the course of the next couple of years. It should be. And, if Trump follows through, as I think he will, he completely has the tools at his disposal to do the job.

With academia, multiple issues come together to put the industry in a position of high vulnerability. First, of course, is that academia is almost universally associated with the farthest of the far political left, the wokest of the woke. Academics, almost to a person, have opposed Trump in everything he has proposed and stood for and have viciously attacked him at every opportunity.

The second is that nearly all academic institutions get vast sums of money every year from the federal government. Much of that is for bona fide research, like the search for new medical cures, but large amounts of the aid (nobody knows exactly how much) go to fund every sort of left-wing course and program.

And the third issue that makes academic institutions particularly vulnerable is that almost without exception they have been systematically and pervasively engaging in illegal racial and sex discrimination for decades. Some of that discrimination has been in the area of admissions, as was exposed in the famous case of SFFA v. Harvard decided by the Supreme Court in 2023. But that was only one piece of the illegal conduct. There has been vast other illegal conduct, going under the general heading of “diversity, equity and inclusion” or DEI, at nearly every academic institution and in virtually every aspect of their operations: in addition to admissions, also in faculty and administrative hiring; in creating DEI bureaucracies and enforcement procedures; in setting up various academic programs, majors, and departments (for example, the so-called “studies” departments and majors); in funding “cultural centers”; and on and on.

And now comes President Trump with his anti-DEI Executive Orders. There were two on this subject, one on January 20, and a second on January 21. The first, which ordered an end to all DEI programs within the federal government itself, has gotten the more publicity. But the second is the one that is the more significant for academia. This is the one that deals with DEI practices in the private sector. The early sections of this EO sound relatively bland. For example, here is the text of Section 2, titled “Policy”:

It is the policy of the United States to protect the civil rights of all Americans and to promote individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.  I therefore order all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.  I further order all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.

But then as we proceed through the details, we come to some seriously explosive items. For example, here is the text of Section 3(a)(iv):

(iv)   The head of each agency shall include in every contract or grant award:
(A)  A term requiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government’s payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code; and
(B)  A term requiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.

Probably, most for-profit private businesses will have little trouble dealing with these provisions. They will end whatever DEI schemes they may still have, and move on. But what about academic institutions. They get vast government grants, and thus are “contractors” subject to the Order. How exactly are they going to comply? They have DEI corruption infesting every nook and cranny of their very being.

And universities are hugely, and foolishly, dependent on federal funding. I just thought I would look up the funding status of a couple of institutions with which I am most familiar. At Yale, I find a Yale Daily News piece from January 29 headlined “Federal aid freeze threatens almost $1 billion of Yale funding.” The piece reports that Yale got $899 million in grants and contracts from the federal government in its most recent fiscal year. (Yale’s total annual budget is about $6 billion.). Over at Harvard, it’s roughly the same story: $676 million of reported federal grants in 2023 on a budget of about $6.4 billion. I suspect that the dependency on federal funding at other elite schools is comparable.

Now, to keep the money flowing, they will have to “certify” that they do not “operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.” The people receiving these certifications will not be the sort to just accept obvious lies from crooks. It will be fun to watch that play out.

And then we have Trump’s nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon. Dhillon, besides having served as chair of California’s Republican Party, is known in private practice for taking on civil rights cases on behalf of conservatives. For example, according to a Wikipedia bio here, she has represented the UC Berkeley College Republicans (in a case accusing UCB of preventing conservatives from speaking on campus), Google programmer James Damore (in a case claiming Damore was wrongly discharged for expressing his opinions on the capabilities of women as programmers), conservative journalist Andy Ngo (in a case arising out of Ngo’s assault on the streets of Portland, Oregon by Antifa thugs), and so forth.

You get the idea — Dhillon’s idea of civil rights law is roughly the opposite of that of the current denizens of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which she will shortly be heading. She will be coming into a Civil Rights Division that has just wrapped up its activities before the curtain fell on the Biden term by trying to ram through consent decrees tying up the hands of the police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville. (It looks like they have failed in those efforts, and I suspect that the cases against these police departments will shortly be withdrawn.)

I checked the status of Dhillon’s nomination, and as far as I can tell no committee hearing has yet been scheduled. Perhaps the Senate Democrats will pull out every stop to try to stall her confirmation. On the other hand, they have so far been notably less successful in stalling Trump’s nominees than they were the last time around in 2017.

I would highly expect Dhillon as a top item on her agenda to begin some high profile investigations of universities for violations of the civil rights laws, particularly in their DEI policies. In any such investigation, it will not just be ending the DEI programs that will be at issue; the defendant will also need to fight for its life to keep its federal funding flowing.

The depth of the corruption in academia today is truly profound. Perhaps, some amount of it can be reversed. Maybe even a lot of it.