Lack of numeracy and scientific understanding
There are few among our political elite and the supporting SCS who have STEM degrees and the consequence of this narrow pool is a failure to understand basic concepts, e.g. they believe “the science is settled” when it comes to climate change, and that they’re “following the science” regarding Covid-19. What they fail to appreciate is that science is rarely settled. By its nature, it is about investigating and challenging assumptions, collecting and evaluating evidence to test hypotheses, and seeking to avoid bias and misrepresentation of results. The current narrative regarding testing and ‘cases’ is a classic example of this lack of numeracy and statistical knowledge. If you test more you are likely to find more occurrences and they may be actual positives or false positives.
Yes, exactly. This gels perfectly with a conversation I had recently with ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg — in which we agreed that the climate change scare was effectively a dry run for the Chinese coronavirus scare.
Of course, both problems are “real” to a degree. Climate does change, potentially causing disruption. Covid-19 is potentially fatal. But neither problem, on the evidence we have now accumulated, has done anywhere near as much damage as the “solutions”.
Take Victoria, Australia, which — as this article by James Bolt at Spiked! illustrates — has used Chinese coronavirus as a justification for effectively imposing martial law on its citizens:
A couple are watching their child play in a playground. They are fined by the police. They are further than five kilometres from their home.
A man leaves his home at 9.30pm to buy some cigarettes. He too is fined: $1,652. He has left his house during the city-wide curfew, which comes in at 8pm.
On Facebook, two men plan a protest against Victoria’s restrictions. Police execute a search warrant and seize their mobile phones and a computer. One is charged with incitement because he wanted to organise a protest – public gatherings are limited to two people and only for exercise (physical, not of our basic rights).
This is the situation in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, right now. In a supposedly liberal democracy.
Does this sound a remotely proportionate response to a disease which so far, in the whole of Australia, has killed fewer than 500 people?
Unless you live somewhere enlightened like Sweden, you’ll have had personal experience of this authoritarian lunacy – compulsory masks, extended quarantines, and so on. To anyone familiar with the nature of the pandemic it seems as if the entire global political and administrative class has lost its head.
But the question is: why?
Why are politicians and civil servants overreacting in this way? And why are so many people actually applauding as more and more of their freedoms are curtailed and their economies are destroyed in the name of health and safety?
My view is that the climate change scare has a lot to do with it. For nearly three decades — it started with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit — the West, especially, has been relentlessly propagandised into believing that the end of the world is imminent and that urgent, expensive and disruptive action must be taken to prevent it.
As Lomborg says in his latest book False Alarm, “We live in an age of fear.”
One picture summarizes this age for me. It is of a girl holding a sign saying:
You’ll die of old age
I’ll die of climate change
But the little girl won’t die of climate change any more than all but the tiniest minority of us will die from Covid-19. Yet across the world — in Britain, certainly, but I think in most other Western economies too — we are at the mercy of a leftist Deep State quite incapable of reason or objectivity, let alone of subjecting the policies it inflicts on us to a cost-benefit analysis.
I think things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, don’t you?
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