UN's IPCC withdraws alarmist scenario, local media continues alarmist news

Take a quick look at the most consequential graph of the last two decades, below.

But first, the news: the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Change (i.e., the IPCC, the organisation promoting the Climate Scare) has officially withdrawn the warmist scenario known as RCP8.5.

This (below) is roughly what the IPCC's RCP8.5 predicts:

For context (and contrast(, here's the actual satellite record of temperatures for the last few decades:

So what's this RCP8.5 then? The simple answer is that it's the scaremongering scenario sold to "policymakers" as their "business-as-usual" scenario. Here in New Zealand it's become "their main planning scenario with authorities planning for 'managed retreat,' forced abandonment of settlements, and insurance companies refusing to insure."

As Quico Toro explains, if the RCP8.5 scenario were comparable with models used to design bridges, it would result in bridges designed to take around 250 M1 Abrams tanks all at once. Not just unrealistic, but illusionary. 

The “8.5” in RCP8.5 refers to the amount of added solar energy the atmosphere will trap by 2100—specifically, 8.5 watts per square meter. That’s very high—likely to bring about a shocking 5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

RCP8.5 was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg’s accusation, in her September 2019 speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” It’s the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch “Extinction Rebellion.” It’s been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups from Adelaide to Zurich, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique you’ve read in the last 15 years.

And it’s been the default setting for literally thousands of climate science papers—Google Scholar lists more than 30,000 published since 2018 alone. It was from this kind of research that we got lurid papers like “Future of the human climate niche,” where respectable Dutch climate scientists claimed that one in three human beings live in regions that will become unlivable in the next 50 years. It was this kind of research that gave rise to countless breathless headlines about how outdoor labor was about to become impossible across much of the tropical world, and alarmist documentaries claiming the ocean was about to end up without any fish. It was RCP8.5 that turned David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” into the most read story in the history of New York Magazine, and later propelled the book version to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

The story of RCP8.5 is ultimately the story of what goes wrong when people convinced they are defending “The Science” catastrophically misunderstand how science works, and when politicized activists glom onto legitimate scientific tools and insist on ramming the round peg of probabilistic forecasting into the square hole of fundraising emails.

As we say above, here in New Zealand millions of words have been written based on the RCP8.5 scenario leading to authorities planning for 'managed retreat,' for forced abandonment of settlements, for insurance companies refusing to insure, for governments slowly but surely strangling our production of energy.

In the month since this became news however, there has been precisely ONE mention of RCP8.5's withdrawal in the local media. One.

What does that tell you?

Why good ideas are oft-born as twins

"We often praise ideas for their originality and criticise other ideas for being insufficiently novel. So, what do we make of the fact that most important breakthroughs in sci-tech history—the telegraph, telescope, and transistor; the laws of calculus and gravity—were 'simultaneously invented' by independent people around the same time? (Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray notoriously filed for a telephone patent on the same day.)
    "Which is to say: Some of the most important ideas in the world weren't 'new' when the inventor we credit came up with them.
    "It's even more uncanny than that. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace didn't just independently come up with the basics of evolution. They both cited the exact same essay—Malthus's infamous 'Principle of Population'—as inspiration for thinking about species evolution as a competitive game where unforgiving environments shape genetic survival. As @DavidEpstein writes in today's essay, adapted from his ... new book Inside the Box, the frequency of idea twins in history suggests that once a problem is framed by a generation of thinkers with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost 'wants' to be found."

~ @Derek Thompson summarising David Epstein's essay 'Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original'

"All abstract knowledge depends, for its meaning and validity, on other knowledge that sets the context for it. For example, algebra depends on addition, and calculus depends on algebra. The more complex the knowledge, the more extensive the knowledge that must precede it.
    "One major aspect of the fact that knowledge depends on other knowledge—the aspect most relevant to and most violated in education—is that more abstract knowledge depends on less abstract knowledge. This is the principle of the hierarchy of knowledge."

~ Lisa Van Damme from her article 'The Hierarchy of Knowledge: The Most Neglected Issue in Education'

"Valid concepts [once discovered] function as a 'green light' to induction, permitting [further] generalisations from observed particulars, while invalid concepts block or distort the process."

~ summary of the inductive process given in David Harriman's 2011 book The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics & Philosophy

"[I]nherent in this is that concepts are future-looking. A concept is like a policy or a commitment. It’s like forming a file. ... A file, if you have a filing system, does not only organise and condense data that one already has, it does so on the premise of keeping up with this method of organisation. ... 
    "[T]o form a concept [then] is to institute a policy of applying what one knows from the study of each instance to the study of each other instance, to regard the instances as interchangeable, at least within a certain context, within a certain, you know, varying in degree. And this policy applies to information yet to be discovered, as well as to the information one already has ..."

~ Gregory Salmieri from his 2006 essay 'Objectivist Epistemology in Outline'

It's been raining a lot

It was the explosion heard almost around the world, yet now all but forgotten. The Hunga Tonga/Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunami devastated much of the island kingdom of Tonga, displacing hundreds of people from the outer islands, and propelling a record-breaking amount of water vapour into the Earth's stratosphere -- enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

As an underwater volcano, it thrust an unprecedented amount of water into the sky, increasing total stratospheric water content by about 10% -- enough to cause a rapid change in atmospheric chemistry. That additional water vapour from the eruption is still up there, still decaying steadily, not expected to return to its pre-eruption range until around 2030.

Talking to a friend recently about the rain, the floods, the wet weather events in the last few years, you have to wonder whether that massive uptick in stratospheric water might still be playing a part?

Hunga Tonga erupted in January 2022. MetService recorded 53 severe weather events in 2022, and issued 182 severe weather warnings. In January 2023 Auckland had its worst flood in memory, a record 539mm of raining falling in January. Cyclone Gabrielle arrived in Feb 2023. Extreme rain events occurred throughout 2024, from extreme rainfall events occurred throughout the year, from Dunedin to Westland. The North Island got a Red Alert and the South Island a state of emergency in May 2025 for record rainfall and strong winds. And this week Wellingtonians were stuck with severe flooding and landslides after 77mm of rain fell in less than one hour, causing the worst flooding event since Wellington's disastrous 1976 storm.

Naturally, NIWA says "nothing to see here." (They don't seem to have even mentioned the eruption since 2024.) The influential 2025 Hunga Volcanic Eruption Atmospheric Impacts Report frustratingly focusses more on temperature than rainfall. But just as the atmospheric water increase still lingers, so too a few studies suggest some lingering interest in the question -- examining especially how much the eruption  may have nudged rainfall patterns in the Southern Hemisphere, including New Zealand.

A January 2026 study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics found some statistically significant extratropical regional climate responses to the eruption, driven by circulation changes. A recent finding from the Austrian Polar Research Institute), published just weeks ago, found that the eruption continues to influence stratospheric patterns, increasing chances of extreme precipitation events at mid-latitudes-- which includes New Zealand.

Yet while they're happy to go on the record about their modelled "causes" of recent rainfall events, the largest volcanic eruption this century remains the climate event no local climate scientists want to talk about. 

I can't imagine why.

"Like so many of the Trump administration’s actions, this is simultaneously weird, dangerous, and profoundly stupid. And we are all going to pay the price for it."

"Last night brought news that the US Food & Drug Agency (FDA) has refused to review Moderna’s application for their new mRNA influenza vaccine ...  Right off, let’s just make clear that an outright refusal-to-review rejection like this is quite unusual ... especially unusual for a vaccine. If there is a prior example like this with the FDA, I am unaware of it. ...

"[T]his application is being denied personally by Vinay Prasad [an anti-vaxxer appointed by RFK Jr to be the agency's top vaccine regulator] and against the recommendation of the FDA’s remaining experts, because he and the rest of the Trump administration are hostile to vaccines in general and to mRNA technology in particular. I don’t see how anyone can look at the statements and actions of the political appointees (from RFK Jr. on down) and come away with any other impression. We are deliberately walking away from the most advanced form of one of the most effective public health measures available to the human race, and instead we are investigated older technologies that happen to involve the administration’s friends. Meanwhile, mRNA therapies are under investigation - in more advanced parts of the world - for far more than vaccines, including various types of cancer. But we, on the other hand, seem to be plowing money into ivermectin (of all things) for that purpose.

"Like so many of the Trump administration’s actions, this is simultaneously weird, dangerous, and profoundly stupid. And we are all going to pay the price for it."

~ Derek Lowe from his post 'An mRNA Refusal to File' [hat tip Duncan B.]

Thanksgiving isn't a New Zealand holiday, but giving thanks should be a universal trait.

Robert Green Ingersoll was the nineteenth-century's Christopher Hitchens—a famous and crusading atheist—like Hitchens except Ingersoll was kinder, and not a Trotskyite. And he was full of gratitude. This, here, was just a portion (the final part, starting page 58) ) of his famous 1897 Thanksgiving Sermon [hat tip Jerry Coyne] ...

A Thanksgiving Sermon

by Robert Green Ingersoll

Whom shall we thank? 

Standing here at the close of the 19th century — amid the trophies of thought — the triumphs of genius — here under the flag of the Great Republic — knowing something of the history of man — here on this day that has been set apart for thanksgiving, I most reverently thank the good me,. the good women of the past, I thank the kind fathers, the loving mothers of the savage days.  I thank the father who spoke the first gentle word, the mother who first smiled upon her babe. I thank the first true friend.

I thank the savages who hunted and fished that they and their babes might live. I thank those who cultivated the ground and changed the forests into farms — those who built rude homes and watched the faces of their happy children in the glow of fireside flames — those who domesticated horses, cattle and sheep — those who invented wheels and looms and taught us to spin and weave — those who by cultivation changed wild grasses into wheat and corn, changed bitter things to fruit, and worthless weeds to flowers, that sowed within our souls the seeds of art. 

I thank the poets of the dawn — the tellers of legends — the makers of myths — the singers of joy and grief, of hope and love. I thank the artists who chiseled forms in stone and wrought with light and shade the face of man. I thank the philosophers, the thinkers, who taught us how to use our minds in the great search for truth. 

I thank the astronomers who explored the heavens, told us the secrets of the stars, the glories of the constellations — the geologists who found the story of the world in fossil forms, in memoranda kept in ancient rocks, in lines written by waves, by frost and fire — the anatomists who sought in muscle, nerve and bone for all the mysteries of life — the chemists who unraveled Nature’s work that they might learn her art — the physicians who have laid the hand of science on the brow of pain, the hand whose magic touch restores — the surgeons who have defeated Nature’s self and forced her to preserve the lives of those she laboured to destroy. I thank the discoverers of chloroform and ether, the two angels who give to their beloved sleep, and wrap the throbbing brain in the soft robes of dreams. 

I thank the great inventors — those who gave us movable type and the press, by means of which great thoughts and all discovered facts are made immortal — the inventors of engines, of the great ships, of the railways, the cables and telegraphs. I thank the great mechanics, the workers in iron and steel, in wood and stone. I thank the inventors and makers of the numberless things of use and luxury.

I thank the industrious men, the loving mothers, the useful women. They are the benefactors of our race. The inventor of pins did a thousand times more good than all the popes and cardinals, the bishops and priests — than all the clergymen and parsons, exhorters and theologians that ever lived. The inventor of matches did more for the comfort and convenience of mankind than all the founders of religions and the makers of all creeds — than all malicious monks and selfish saints.

I thank the honest men and women who have expressed their sincere thoughts, who have been true to themselves and have preserved the veracity of their souls.

I thank the thinkers of Greece and Rome. Zeno and Epicurus, Cicero and Lucretius. I thank Bruno, the bravest, and Spinoza, the subtlest of men.

I thank Voltaire, whose thought lighted a flame in the brain of man, unlocked the doors of superstition’s cells and gave liberty to many millions of his fellow-men. Voltaire — a name that sheds light. Voltaire — a star that superstition’s darkness cannot quench.

I thank the great poets — the dramatists. I thank Homer and Aeschylus, and I thank Shakespeare above them all. I thank Burns for the heart-throbs he changed into songs. for his lyrics of flame. I thank Shelley for his Skylark, Keats for his Grecian Urn and Byron for his Prisoner of Chillon. I thank the great novelists. I thank the great sculptors. I thank the unknown man who moulded and chiseled the Venus de Milo. I thank the great painters. I thank Rembrandt and Corot. I thank all who have adorned, enriched and ennobled life — all who have created the great, the noble, the heroic and artistic ideals.

I thank the statesmen who have preserved the rights of man. I thank Paine whose genius sowed the seeds of independence in the hearts of ’76. I thank Jefferson whose mighty words for liberty have made the circuit of the globe. I thank the founders, the defenders, the saviors of the Republic. I thank Ericsson, the greatest mechanic of his century, for the monitor. I thank Lincoln for the Proclamation. I thank Grant for his victories and the vast host that fought for the right, — for the freedom of man. I thank them all — the living and the dead.

I thank the great scientists — those who have reached the foundation, the bed-rock — who have built upon facts — the great scientists, in whose presence theologians look silly and feel malicious.

The scientists never persecuted, never imprisoned their fellow-men. They forged no chains, built no dungeons, erected no scaffolds — tore no flesh with red hot pincers — dislocated no joints on racks, crushed no hones in iron boots — extinguished no eyes — tore out no tongues and lighted no fagots. They did not pretend to be inspired — did not claim to be prophets or saints or to have been born again. They were only intelligent and honest men. They did not appeal to force or fear. They did not regard men as slaves to be ruled by torture, by lash and chain, nor as children to be cheated with illusions, rocked in the cradle of an idiot creed and soothed by a lullaby of lies.

They did not wound — they healed. They did not kill — they lengthened life. They did not enslave — they broke the chains and made men free. They sowed the seeds of knowledge, and many millions have reaped, are reaping, and will reap the harvest: of joy.

I thank Humboldt and Helmholtz and Haeckel and Buchner. I thank Lamarck and Darwin — Darwin who revolutionized the thought of the intellectual world. I thank Huxley and Spencer. I thank the scientists one and all.

I thank the heroes, the destroyers of prejudice and fear — the dethroners of savage gods — the extinguishers of hate’s eternal fire — the heroes, the breakers of chains — the founders of free states — the makers of just laws — the heroes who fought and fell on countless fields — the heroes whose dungeons became shrines — the heroes whose blood made scaffolds sacred — the heroes, the apostles of reason, the disciples of truth, the soldiers of freedom — the heroes who held high the holy torch and filled the world with light.

With all my heart I thank them all.

* * * * 

Science + mysticism = ?

"The issue is how to predict when a now-dormant volcano, Mount Taranaki on New Zealand’s North Island, will erupt again. The ['Herald'] article summarises a five-year study of how to predict not just that but also how to assess the damage from an eruption. The researchers apparently used real science to get the dates of eruptions ... and research from Massey University to calculate possible damage. ...

"None of the references given in the 'Herald' piece ... even mention mātauranga Māori, but it’s still touted as helping ... 'to weave together' ... empirical observation ... [with] indigenous 'ways of knowing' stuff, heavily larded with Māori words. ...

"Bilingual resources, interactive StoryMaps, and wānanga [tribal or traditional knowledge; could also mean an 'indigenous sage'] created spaces for kōrero [conversations] about the mounga’s [mountain's] past and future.

" 'You can’t understand volcanic risk in Taranaki without understanding the whakapapa [genealogy or history] of the mountain, whenua [land] and awa [rivers], the kōrero tuku iho [oral tradition] and mātauranga [knowledge] held by whānau [family groups], hapū [kinship groups or tribes] and iwi [tribes] who hold ancestral connections to the mounga [mountain] and have done so for generations,' said Acushla Dee Sciascia of Mapuna Consultants.

"This research provided a platform for Māori researchers to contribute their voices, leading to richer outputs including monographs, visual exhibitions, and new ways of telling the mounga’s story.

" 'Taranaki mounga [tribal groups near the mountain] provides us with so many learnings [lessons] from its past and how our tūpuna [ancestors] navigated previous volcanic events, and it’s up to us now to prepare our whānau [land] for the future,' Sciascia said.

" 'This programme has laid a foundation. But the real mahi [effort] is in how we carry this forward, and how we embed mātauranga Māori into everyday planning, science, and response.'

"What is missing here is how mātauranga Māori really is woven together with Western science in a productive way. Conspicuously absent is any mention about how mātauranga Māori really does help us assess volcanic risk ... Nor does seeing how earlier inhabitants coped with the damage give us much help in figuring out how to cope with the damage now. In the end, it seems that straight empirical observation and empirical-based prediction is what is needed here, and I can’t for the life of me find out how mātauranga Māori can help with that."

~ Jerry Coyne from his post 'Mātauranga Māori strikes again'

They "aim to change science from an endeavour finding truth about nature to an endeavour that’s a lever for social justice."

"'Nature' magazine published [a] long comment [recently], written by eight indigenous authors from five countries. [It] is a ... surrender to 'progressive' views that aim to change science from an endeavour finding truth about nature to an endeavour that’s a lever for social justice. Surprisingly, though, Nature allowed the authors to use the 'progressive' term of 'decolonisation,' arguing explicitly that the science is the result of colonisation of knowledge by white men from the Global North—a situation that must be rectified, pronto.

"The authors give eight ways to rectify the 'colonisation,' all of them involving sacrificing merit for ethnicity, replacing modern science with 'other ways of knowing,' and demanding both professional, monetary, and territorial reparations, even from those who never oppressed anybody. ...

"[A]s I’ve written about in extenso, 'indigenous knowledge' is never on par with modern science. Yes, indigenous people can contribute empirical truths to science, but indigenous 'science' almost invariably consists of local knowledge helping people to live in their specific environment (in New Zealand, for example, it consists of stuff like knowing how to harvest mussels or where to catch eels), and isn’t generalisable to other places. It does not use the tools of modern science and, as in New Zealand, is often imbued with nonscientific aspects like ethics, morality, unsubstantiated lore, and supernatural trappings like teleology and myth.

"Yes, some aspects of indigenous 'science' can and should be worked into science classes, but most of it should be taught in sociology or anthropology class. ...

"As one of my colleagues said after reading this paper, 'The authors’ decolonisation/indigenisation ideology is not only antithetical to science, it’s also anti-Enlightenment, and as such challenges the whole idea of universities as places where ideas are tested on the basis of reason and evidence without the imposition of cultural authority'.”

~ Jerry Coyne from his post 'The journal Nature calls for “decolonization” of modern science'

"Astrology is alive and well in some New Zealand classrooms"

"Astrology is alive and well in some New Zealand classrooms thanks to the Education Ministry’s push to give indigenous knowledge equal standing with scientific knowledge. ... [These include] an array of online resources intended to enlighten teachers and students on the wonders of the Māori Lunar Calendar, or Maramataka [,which suggesting that a particular phase of the Moon can influence human behaviour, health, horticulture or the weather.]

"Unfortunately, most of these resources are woefully uncritical and fail to mention that there is very little science [in] support ...

"[Teachers] fear ... being branded racist or anti-Māori [for bing opposed], but just because something is part of Māori culture should not render it immune from criticism. ...

"[Other] teachers are now consulting the Calendar to plan their lessons around ‘high’ and ‘low’ energy days to determine which phases of the Moon are best to conduct assessments, carry out sporting activities, and even when to go on trips. Some teachers have even taken to scheduling meetings on days deemed less likely to trigger conflict, all under the moniker of ‘ancient Māori wisdom.’ Indoctrination is also starting early.

"In the Far North a group of ECE teachers have been giving lessons on the waxing and waning ‘energy levels’ of the Moon to over 10 early childhood centres. ...

"It is time to get government-sponsored pseudoscience out of our schools and health system. It begins by having the courage to call a spade a spade. If supporters of Māori knowledge want parity with science, then it needs to be subjected to the same rigorous standards that other forms of knowledge undergo. ...

"If people want to teach this ‘folklore’ as a cultural belief – that’s fine, but don’t teach it as a reality and leave out the scientific perspective. That’s educational malpractice and indoctrination."

~ Robert Bartholomew from his post 'The Māori Astrology Craze – Stop Teaching Pseudoscience to Our Kids'

Let's not ban social media for sub-16-year olds

WHEN AUSTRALIA PASSES LEGISLATION, we're often not far behind.

Australia's Orwellianly titled Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act was passed last year. 

The Act's aim is to ban under 16-year olds from social media.

The social media ban was rushed through Parliament with no real inquiry into the nature of the problem it was supposed to solve or the likely effects of a ban. Evidence from mental health experts on the question of whether and how social media use is harmful is at best inconclusive, as far as I can determine.
    But the advocates of a ban haven’t worried too much about that. They’ve relied on casual correlation and on the testimony of instant experts, with no particular expertise in the mental health of young people. ... most notably Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt.

Twenge peddles bullshit based on so-called "generational analysis"— on the assumption that being a "millennial"/"Gen Z"/"Gen Y"/"Gen Jones" is any more effective than astrology. (Indeed, as one review of her latest book concludes, "for serious scholarly work, five-year birth cohorts, categorised by race, gender and class background, are much more useful. For entertainment purposes, astrology is just as good and less divisive.”)

Jonathan Haidt is other alleged expert relied upon. Haidt was good on teenagers' need for more independence — here he is not only bad at the data, but is arguing against his own earlier conclusion. In Mike Masnick's summary of the situation:

Six years ago, NYU social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt co-authored 'The Coddling of the American Mind. 'In the book, he and Greg Lukianoff argued that parents are doing a real disservice to their kids by overprotecting (coddling) them, rather than giving them more freedom and allowing them to make mistakes and learn.
    This year, he’s back with a new book, 'The Anxious Generation,' arguing the exact opposite in the digital world: that social media and smartphones have made kids under-protected, rewiring brains and increasing teenage depression rates.
    Haidt tries to address this obvious contradiction in his book with the standard cop-out of the purveyor of every modern moral panic: “This time it’s different!” He provides little evidence to support that.

"Unfortunately for those seeking an easy solution," says Masnick "the data doesn’t support Haidt’s conclusions."

[A]s a quick summary: he’s wrong on the data, which undermines his entire argument. Almost every single expert in the field who does actual research on these issues says so. Candice Odgers ripped apart his misleading use of data in Nature. Andrew Przybylski, who has done multiple, detailed studies using massive amounts of data going back years, and keeps finding little to no evidence of the things Haidt claims, has talked about the problems in Haidt’s data. Ditto Jeff Hancock, at Stanford, who recently helped put together the National Academies of Sciences report on social media and adolescent health (which also did not find what Haidt found).
    Indeed, one thing that came up in looking over the “strongest” research in the book was that (contrary to some of Haidt’s claims), data outside of the US on suicide rates seem to show they’re often (not always) going down, not up. Even worse, the data on depression in the US showing an increase in depression rates among kids is almost certainly due to changes in screening practices for depression and how suicide ideation is recorded.
    As my review notes, though, the problems with the data are only the very beginning of the problems with the book. Because, in the first part of the book, Haidt misleadingly throws around all the data, but in the latter part, he focuses on his policy recommendations.

It's those very policy recommendations that Australia has just followed! 

It's not just pseudo-psychology based on bad data: "even his former co-author, Greg Lukianoff, pointed out that Haidt’s proposals clearly violate [the US's] First Amendment."

So fast and loose on both data and free speech!

CANDICE ODGERS IS ONE researcher whose data, she says, from "studies on the impact of phones and social media on children, including a 'study of studies,' conclude that social media is good for some kids, helping them find like-minded individuals. It’s mostly neutral for many kids, and problematic for only a very small group (studies suggest less than 10 percent)." In other words, as she notes in her review of Haidt’s book 

the evidence suggests the causality is likely in the other direction.

Ouch.

A recent debate pitted Odgers against Haidt, where — as he watched his argument crumble — he had to admit that she knows the data better than he.

This matters, because this bullshit will be coming here soon. You can count on it.

A judge in a Florida court this week summarises how absurd the bullshit is.  Masnick commentates the brawl:

The transcript reads like a master class in dismantling moral panic arguments. When Florida’s lawyers stood up in court to defend the law, they reached for what they clearly thought was their strongest argument: “Well, Your Honor, it is well known in this country that kids are addicted to these platforms.”

But Judge Mark Walker, chief judge of the Northern District of Florida, wasn’t buying what Florida was selling. His response cut straight to the heart of why these kinds of claims deserve skepticism, and some of it was based on his own childhood experience on the other side of a moral panic:

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Well, Your Honor, it is well known in this country that kids are addicted to these platforms. This is a mental health —

THE COURT: It was well known when I was growing up that I was going to become a Satanist because I played Dungeons & Dragons. Is that — I don’t know what really that means. You can say that there’s studies, Judge, and you can’t ignore expert reports that say X.

The D&D reference isn’t just an amusing comeback — it’s a federal judge explaining through personal experience why courts shouldn’t accept “everybody knows” arguments about harm to children. After all, lots of things have been “well known” to harm children over the years. It was “well known” that chess made kids violent. Or that the waltz would be fatal to young women, or that the phone would prevent young men from ever speaking to young women again. I could go on with more examples, because there are so many.

When Florida’s lawyer tried to argue that social media was somehow different — that this time the moral panic was justified — Judge Walker was ready with historical receipts:

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Kids weren’t reading comics — millions and millions of kids weren’t reading comics eight hours a day. Millions and millions of kids weren’t listening to rap music eight hours a day. There’s something different going on here, and there’s a consensus —

THE COURT: The problem, Counsel, that’s a really bad example, the comics, because there is an entire exhibit in Glasgow where they barred comics in the entire country because somebody decided that comics were turning their youth against their parents and were causing them to engage and worship the supernatural and stuff.

So, I mean, I guess that was the point the plaintiffs were making is from the beginning of time, we’ve targeted things under some belief that it’s harming our youth, but doesn’t necessarily make it so.

But, go ahead.

That trailing “but, go ahead” is savage. I think I’d rather curl up in a ball and try to disappear in the middle of a courtroom than “go ahead” after that.

"There is no such thing as western science, just science."

"At The Conversation [they say] 'We surveyed 316 researchers from research organisations across New Zealand ... A majority agreed mātauranga Māori should be valued on par with Western science.' Any academic who refers to science as 'western science' can almost certainly be dismissed as not serious. There is no such thing as western science, just science. We don’t have western gravity. ... It is about a method.
    "So an easy rule of thumb is to dismiss anyone who talks about Western science. They have no understanding of either science or history."

~ David Farrar from his post 'How to tell if academics can be ignored'

"No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilisation, nor even as much."

 

Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his 

wife and collaborator Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, 

Jacques-Louis David (1788)

"The charges against Western civilisation involve slavery, imperialism, and genocide. No doubt, some Westerners and Western regimes have committed such atrocities.
    "The transatlantic slave trade conducted by some Westerners between Africa and the New World was a horror. ... Regarding European imperialism, the cruelty toward indigenous peoples is best illustrated by ... King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo ... [who] hired an army of mercenaries to enslave the native population, demanded that the enslaved meet high quotas for rubber production and ivory harvesting, had his mercenaries chop off the hands of those who fell short, and had them kill recalcitrant natives and burn their villages. ...
    "All these injustices occurred, and objectivity requires acknowledgment of this fact. But we should identify the full truth—which raises several questions about the anti-Western narrative. ...
    "The claim that European and American powers attempted genocide in the New World is worse than either a severe exaggeration or a gross distortion of facts: It is an outright lie. ... To the extent that slavery has been abolished, the credit lies with the abolitionism developed in the West, ending slavery in its own territories and then applying pressure on non-Western nations to shut down the evil practice. ...
    "Even ... a brief survey of history ... is more than enough to raise the question: Why single out white Westerners for the most virulent moral abuse? But we still have not mentioned the major truth overlooked by ... fallacious arguments against the West. .. We refer, of course, to the enormous life-giving achievements of Western civilisation—life-giving for human beings all over the world. ... I’ll merely provide a few examples of these achievements.

• Growing sufficient food is and has long been a terrible problem throughout the non-industrialised world. .... The Green Revolution helped people grow vastly increased supplies of food ... saving upwards of one billion lives ...
• Disease prevention and cure is another critical field for human life in which Western researchers have excelled. [Antoine Lavoisier's pioneering chemistry; Maurice Hillman's and Salk & Sabin's vaccines; Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease; Joseph Lister's call for antiseptic surgery; Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin ... ] How many human lives around the world did these giants of medicine save? An incalculable number. 
• And Aristotle... the first great biologist of whom we know. His pathbreaking work in the life sciences laid the foundation for subsequent medical advances. Above all, Aristotle married his revolutionary work in logic to his commitment to painstaking empirical research, emphasising that knowledge is gained by logical, noncontradictory thinking about observed facts. He, more than anyone, taught humanity how to think, making progress possible in every field of cognition.
• And no discussion of Western science, no matter how brief, could omit mention of several of the greatest minds of history—Galileo, Newton, and Darwin ...
• In literature, from Homer and Sappho through Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters to Ayn Rand in the 20th century ... In music, the West has produced such giants as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Verdi, Dvořák, and Puccini. Michelangelo was a towering sculptor, Rembrandt and Vermeer superlative painters, and Leonardo an all-round genius. Film ... has seen such brilliant directors ... as Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Steven Spielberg, and Clint Eastwood, as well as a host of talented actors and actresses.

"Even a brief recounting of Western genius must cite John Locke and the birth of the moral principle of individual rights in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, leading to ... an Industrial Revolution, and stupendous wealth creation and prosperity across vast swathes of the globe ... Starting in Britain, the principle of individual rights led, for the first time in history, to an abolitionist movement that succeeded, to a significant degree, in wiping out the age-old, worldwide scourge of human slavery. Slavery was ubiquitous. Abolitionism was Western.
    "Western civilisation is and often has been profoundly supportive of human life, not because its progenitors have largely been white but because of its fundamental, driving force: reason and all its fruits—freedom, philosophy, science, technology, business, the arts, and other such life-serving values. Skin colour is irrelevant to moral judgment, but reason, individual rights, political-economic liberty, technology and industrialisation—these are vitally important. Western nations export many intellectual and material values to non-Western countries. But its greatest export is a culture of reason and a politics of individual rights; for, to the extent they are adopted, these facilitate immensely life-giving advances in every field of rational endeavour, as they have done in the Asian Tigers.
    "No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilisation, nor even as much.
    "Why then, do critics single it out for special moral abuse?"

~ Andrew Bernstein, from his article 'The Case for Western Civilisation' [emphases in the original]

"Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks."

"The world is full of thousands of creation myths and other colourful legends, any of which might be taught alongside Māori myths. Why choose Māori myths? For no better reason than that Māoris arrived in New Zealand a few centuries before Europeans. That would be a good reason to teach Māori mythology in anthropology classes. Arguably there’s even better reason for Australian schools to teach the myths of their indigenous peoples, who arrived tens of thousands of years before Europeans. Or for British schools to teach Celtic myths. Or Anglo-Saxon myths. But no indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes. Science classes are emphatically not the right place to teach scientific falsehoods alongside true science. Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks.
    "The Royal Society of New Zealand, like the Royal Society of which I have the honour to be a Fellow, is supposed to stand for science. Not 'Western' science, not 'European' science, not 'White' science, not 'Colonialist' science. Just science. Science is science is science, and it doesn’t matter who does it, or where, or what 'tradition' they may have been brought up in."

~ Richard Dawkins from his post 'Myths Do Not Belong in Science Classes: Letter to the Royal Society of New Zealand' [hat tip Ele Ludemann]

Q: What is the nature of the artistic drive?

"[A] question I've always been really interested in is ... 'is there a way of understanding why humans continuously and constantly and without exception engage in cultural activity? We don't know of human groups that don't produce something that we would call art. It seems to be something that we are biologically inclined to do. If we are, then what is the nature of that drive? What is it doing for us? When people say, well surely this has been written about, what I say is, actually it hasn't, really. The number of books on this subject is vanishingly small. They occupy a shelf about 18" long. What has been done is a huge sort of taxonomy of cultural artifacts; people sort of listing things and saying that looks a bit like that, and these seem to belong together, and so on and so on. But this is a little bit like natural history before Darwin came along. ...

"[P]art of my life of course is being an artist, but the other part, and just as interesting to me, is wondering what it is I'm doing, or what everybody else is doing — asking what it's for.
    "If you asked 20 scientists what they thought they were doing, or what they thought the point of science was, I would think that most of them would come up with an answer something like, we want to understand the world, we want to see how the world works. If you asked 20 artists the same question — what are you doing it for, what does art do for us — I guarantee you'll get about 15 different answers, and the other five will tell you to mind your own business. There is no consensus whatsoever about what art is there for although some people will say, well, it's to make life more beautiful.
    "Here I am, an artist — who reads mostly science books — like most other artists. I know very few artists who read books about art. Why, I ask myself, is there not a conversation of that quality in the arts? Many artists normally are talking about science, they're not talking about art — there is not a developed language, for having a conversation about the arts....
    "[P]eople had a very poor understanding of the arts, and the reason they could happily waffle on about it was because their waffle was unchallengeable. There's such a poor conversation about it that you can say whatever crap you want to, and nobody's going to call you on it. The other thing is that everybody recognises the power of science. We recognise the power of cloning technologies, of nuclear weapons and so on. Everybody knows that science is powerful and could be dangerous, therefore there's a whole lot of criticism on that basis. What people don't realise is that culture is powerful and could be dangerous too. As long as culture is talked about as though it's a kind of nice little add-on to make things look a bit better in this sort of brutal life we all lead, as long as it's just seen as the icing on the cake, then people won't realise that it's the medium in which we're immersed, and which is forming us, which is making us what we are and what we think.”

~ Brian Eno from his recent "conversation" with Stewart Brand on 'A Big Theory Of Culture'

"Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is."

"I’m going to have to write something in the near future about the big paradox of the pandemic years, which is that we produced a vaccine in record time that saved many millions of lives—the biggest demonstration in decades of the value of vaccines. Yet the result is that anti-vaccine sentiment has increased.
    "I think it’s a combination of three things. First, we are more culturally primed for anti-technology sentiment than we were when the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. Second, thanks to vaccines, we are more culturally removed from the point at which infectious disease was a leading cause of death and a threat that continually loomed over human life, so we no longer appreciate what vaccines have saved us from. Third, a long period between major pandemics meant that nobody had to think about vaccines. They accepted them as a matter of course. But the pandemic suddenly required people to form an opinion about a new vaccine, and when people are required to think, a certain percentage of them will quite frankly be bad at it. Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is.
    "At any rate, misplaced skepticism about vaccines has centred especially around the new technology of mRNA vaccines. But again, the paradox is that this targets a new technology that works. Specifically, mRNA vaccines offer tremendous speed and flexibility in creating new vaccines that shows enormous promise for treating things that could never be treated before.
    "In this case, it’s a vaccine for brain cancer...."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'A Roundup of Good News: The Paradox of mRNA'

How the Enlightenment solved all of our problems

I love it when historical/philosophical eras are trending.  

Fortuitously, philosopher Stephen Hicks (author of the essential text Explaining Postmodernism) has posted this chart, conveniently summarising 'how the Enlightenment solved all of our problems.'

For reference, for the easily confused, the items in the third column are the desirable ones ...

NB: Check out all of Hicks's posts and lectures on the Enlightenment here.

Q: "How does the same mind hold, 'Nothing is certain' and ' Climate catastrophe is certain'?"

"We constantly hear that man can know nothing for certain, that truth is relative to the individual, that observations are 'theory-laden' so cannot claim to be objective, that no scientific claim can be proved true, that we can say only it hasn’t been refuted by the data so far. At the same time and from the same people, we hear that catastrophic climate change is beyond doubt, that those who question it are 'deniers' who should be kicked out of any position of consequence.
    "How does the same mind hold, 'Nothing is certain' and ' Climate catastrophe is certain'?"

~ Harry Binswanger on 'Unnoticed Contradictions'

The Greek legacy ...

Image is from Aristarchus, the great Greek astronomer,
from a tenth-century CE copy of his manuscript

"Every civilisation of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilisation have been as developed as our own. But only the civilisations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries.”

~ Thomas Kuhn, from his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [hat tip Stephen Hicks]

"Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers, marshalling evidence in favour of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument."

"Traditionally, science reporting was mostly descriptive—writers strove to explain new discoveries in a particular field. The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy—writers seek to nudge readers toward a politically approved opinion.
    “'Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers,' [Michael] Shermer says, 'marshalling evidence in favour of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument.' This isn’t just the case in science journalism, of course...."

~ James Meigs from his article 'Unscientific American'

BREAKING: Pacific islands not disappearing

"An amount of land equivalent to the Isle of Wight has been added to the shorelines of 13,000 islands around the world in just the last 20 years. ... a net increase of 157.21 km2.
    "[T]he finding blows holes in the poster scare run by alarmists suggesting that rising sea levels caused by humans using hydrocarbons will condemn many islands to disappear shortly beneath rising sea levels. ...
    "The scientists observed that despite rising sea levels, many shorelines in Tuvalu and neighbouring Pacific atolls have maintained relative stability, “without significant alteration”. [The 101 islands of clilmate poster-child Tuvalu had grown in land mass by 2.9%, they said.] A comprehensive re-examination of data on 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls with 709 islands found that none of them had lost any land. Furthermore, the scientists added, there are data that indicate 47 reef islands expanded in size or remained stable over the last 50 years, “despite experiencing a rate of sea-level rise that exceeds the global average” ....
    "Of the 13,000 islands examined, the researchers found that only around 12% had experienced a significant shoreline shift, with almost equal numbers experiencing either landward (loss) or seaward (gain) movement. ...
    "The ... findings are important in helping destroy the claim that many low-lying islands will simply disappear beneath the waves in the near future due to human-induced climate change. They show how shoreline changes are a persistent and ongoing process that is subject to many natural and human influences. Most of the poster islands used for climate scares such as Tuvalu and the Maldives have increased in size of late, and are hardly suitable to whip up fear of a claimed climate ‘emergency’. Sea level rise is not a 'predominant' cause of the changing coasts, the scientists note."

~ Chris Morrison, from his article 'Islands That Climate Alarmists Said Would Soon “Disappear” Due to Rising Sea Found to Have Grown in Size'

The world is doubling down on New Zealand's stupidity

"There was a time when you could count on the left to defend science with the sort of zeal that would make a religious fundamentalist blush. However, this staunch commitment to scientific empiricism ... is now increasingly coming into conflict with the new tenets of the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) agenda.
    "You can see this clearly in the Biden administration’s proposed new guidelines for ... staff working in public-health agencies ... [who] could soon be instructed to consider ‘multiple forms of evidence, such as indigenous knowledge’ when going about their duties.
    "Put simply, advocates of ‘indigenous knowledge’ argue that various cultures throughout history have their own ways of understanding the world. And these alternative, indigenous ‘ways of knowing’, they say, should be utilised alongside more established scientific methods in research and in policymaking. ...

"The Biden administration is not even the first Western government to sacrifice science to the DEI agenda. Last year, the government of New Zealand decided that science classes in schools should teach that Maori ‘ways of knowing’ have equal standing to ‘Western science’. Scientists who objected to this found themselves under investigation by the Royal Society of New Zealand. Three of them, including one of Maori descent, resigned from the society in protest.
    "The claim that science is ‘Western’ is absurd, of course. One of the many wonderful things about science is that it does not discriminate. Science is a universal, cross-cultural concept. It invites anyone and everyone to participate and contribute to our growing understanding of reality. ... This is why there aren’t any ‘indigenous’ ways of flying an airplane that supersede our scientific understanding of aerodynamics. Or why the NHS doesn’t offer exorcisms as part of its mental-health services. A blood test administered in a clinical setting will yield the same results whether it’s carried out in London or Nairobi – because science actually works anywhere you do it. It’s about the ‘how’, not the ‘who.’ ...
    "Science often gets things wrong, of course. But unlike indigenous ways of knowing, science rewards you for catching errors. It incentivises the pursuit of truth over accepting received wisdom. There are no religious commandments or cultural dogmas dictating the scope of scientific investigation. Science simply finds out ‘what is’ – and to hell with any sacred cows that are slaughtered along the way.
    "Standards of objectivity are essential when it comes to science and public health. We should make no apologies for defending them from the encroachment of pseudoscience, whatever form it comes in. ...
    

"We all know that treating indigenous knowledge as akin to scientific evidence is a bit silly. But I suspect that is probably the point. ... We are all essentially being dared to say that relying on indigenous knowledge is a terrible idea. Of course, if you do say this in the wrong circles, you will be accused of racism and you will be silenced.
    "With modern-day anti-racism, the goal is not to address actual inequalities or to improve the material wellbeing of oppressed minorities. The real aim is to tear down anything that is perceived to be ‘white’ or ‘Western’. And the fact that science is now being placed in the firing line, thanks to racial identity politics, should worry us all."

~ Stephen Knight from his op-ed 'The nonsense of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’'