Grassroots Climate Change Movement Ignores Actual Evidence

Earth Day 2019 is marked by the recent launch of several grassroots organizations whose ostensible aim is to combat climate change. The crusades include the UK’s Extinction Rebellion, the Swedish WeDontHaveTime, and the pied-piper-like campaign sparked by striking Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg. What’s most disturbing about them all is not their intentions or methods, but their ignorance and their disregard of scientific evidence.

Common to the entire movement is the delusional belief that climate Armageddon is imminent – a mere 12 years away, according to U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The WeDontHaveTime manifesto declares that “climate change is killing us” and that we’re already experiencing catastrophe. Trumpets Extinction Rebellion: “The science is clear … we are in a life or death situation … ,” a sentiment echoed by the Sunrise Movement in the U.S. And a proclamation of the youth climate strikers insists that “The climate crisis … is the biggest threat in human history.”

But despite the climate hysteria, these activists show almost no knowledge of the science that supposedly underlies their doomsday claims. Instead, they resort to logically fallacious appeals to authority. Apart from the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which is as much a political body as a scientific one, the authorities include the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen – known for his hype on global warming – and the UK Met Office, an agency with a dismal track record of predicting even the coming season’s weather.

Among numerous mistaken assertions by the would-be crusaders is the constant drumbeat of extreme weather events attributed to human emissions of greenhouse gases. The sadly uninformed protesters seem completely unaware that anomalous weather has been part of the earth’s climate from ancient times, long before industrialization bolstered the CO₂ level in the atmosphere. They don’t bother to check the actual evidence that reveals no long-term trend whatsoever in hurricanes, heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires in more than 100 years. Linking weather extremes to global warming or CO₂ is empty-headed ignorance.

Another fallacy is that the huge Antarctic ice sheet, containing about 90% of the freshwater ice on the earth’s surface, is losing ice and causing sea-level rise to accelerate. But while it’s true that glaciers in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula are thinning, there’s evidence, albeit controversial, that the ice loss is outweighed by new ice formation in East Antarctica from warming-enhanced snowfall. The much smaller Greenland ice sheet is indeed losing ice by melting, but not at an alarming rate.

The cluelessness of the climate change movement is also exemplified by its embrace of false predictions of the future, such as the claim that climate change will cause shortfalls in food production. If anything, exactly the reverse is true. Higher temperatures and the fertilizing effect of CO₂, which helps plants grow, boost crop yields and make plants more resistant to drought.

Participation in the movement runs in the hundreds of thousands around the world, especially among school climate strikers. The eco-anarchist Extinction Rebellion, formed last year, promotes acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to achieve its goals, harking back to “Ban the Bomb” and US civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s. To “save the planet”, the organization is calling for greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced to net zero as soon as 2025.

The newly created WeDontHaveTime subscribes to the widely held political, but unscientific belief that climate change is an existential crisis, and that catastrophe lurks around the corner. Its particular focus is on building a global social media network dedicated to climate change, with the initial phase being launched today, April 22.

The school strike for climate has similar aims, to be achieved by children around the globe playing hooky from school. An estimated total of more than a million pupils in 125 countries demonstrated in strikes on March 15.

The movement’s lack of scientific knowledge extends to the origin of CO₂ emissions as well. Extinction Rebellion and WeDontHaveTime, at least, appear oblivious to the fact that the lion’s share of the world’s CO₂ emissions comes from China and India alone – 34% in 2019, by preliminary estimates, and increasing yearly. If the climate change catastrophists were really serious about their objectives, they’d be directing their efforts against the governments of these two countries instead of wasting time on the West.

Next: Science, Political Correctness and the Great Barrier Reef

The Sugar Industry: Sugar Daddy to Manipulated Science?

Industry funding of scientific research often comes with strings attached. There’s plenty of evidence that industries such as tobacco and lead have been able to manipulate sponsored research to their advantage, in order to create doubt about the deleterious effects of their product. But has the sugar industry, currently in the spotlight because of concern over sugary drinks, done the same?

This charge was recently leveled at the industry by a team of scientists at UCSF (University of California, San Francisco), who accused the industry of funding research in the 1960s that downplayed the risks of consuming sugar and overstated the supposed dangers of eating saturated fat. Both saturated fat and sugar had been linked to coronary heart disease, which was surging at the time.

The UCSF researchers claim to have discovered evidence that an industry trade group secretly paid two prominent Harvard scientists to conduct a literature review refuting any connection between sugar and heart disease, and making dietary fat the villain instead. The published review made no mention of sugar industry funding.

A year after the review came out, the trade group funded an English researcher to conduct a study on laboratory rats. Initial results seemed to confirm other studies indicating that sugars, which are simple carbohydrates, were more detrimental to heart health than complex or starchy carbohydrates like grains, beans and potatoes. This was because sugar appeared to elevate the blood level of triglyceride fats, today a known risk factor for heart disease, through its metabolism by microbes in the gut.

Perhaps more alarmingly, preliminary data suggested that consumption of sugar – though not starch – produced high levels of an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase that other contemporary studies had associated with bladder cancer in humans. Before any of this could be confirmed, however, the industry trade organization shut the research project down; the results already obtained were never published.

The UCSF authors say in a second paper that the literature review’s dismissal of contrary studies, together with the suppression of evidence tying sugar to triglycerides and bladder cancer, show how the sugar industry has attempted for decades to bury scientific data on the health risks of eating sugar. If the findings of the laboratory study had been disclosed, they assert, sugar would probably have been scrutinized as a potential carcinogen, and its role in cardiovascular disease would have been further investigated. Added one of the UCSF team, “This is continuing to build the case that the sugar industry has a long history of manipulating science.”

Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of food policy at New York University, has commented that the internal industry documents unearthed by the UCSF researchers were striking “because they provide rare evidence that the food industry suppressed research it did not like, a practice that has been documented among tobacco companies, drug companies and other industries.”

Nonetheless, the current sugar trade association disputes the UCSF claims, calling them speculative and based on questionable assumptions about events that took place almost 50 years ago. The association also considers the research itself tainted, because it was conducted and funded by known critics of the sugar industry. The industry has consistently denied that sugar plays any role in promoting obesity, diabetes or heart disease.

And despite a statement by the trade association’s predecessor that it was created “for the basic purpose of increasing the consumption of sugar,” other academics have defended the industry. They point out that, at the time of the industry review and the rat study in the 1960s, the link between sugar and heart disease was supported by only limited evidence, and the dietary fat hypothesis was deeply entrenched in scientific thinking, being endorsed by the AHA (American Heart Association) and the U.S. NHI (National Heart Institute).

But, says Nestle, it’s déjà vu today, with the sugar and beverage industries now funding research to let the industries off the hook for playing a role in causing the current obesity epidemic. As she notes in a commentary in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine:

"Is it really true that food companies deliberately set out to manipulate research in their favor? Yes, it is, and the practice continues.”

Next: Grassroots Climate Change Movement Ignores Actual Evidence