The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, recently published a paper analysing the country’s deaths caused by sub-optimal temperatures between 2000 and 2020.
It turns out that extreme cold was responsible for 80 times as many deaths as extreme heat.
Several other papers analysed similar data worldwide. There the difference was smaller but still impressive: cold killed 17 times more people than heat did.
When a friend of mine, who is a regular reader of, and occasional contributor to, The Lancet, told me about this, I was amazed – not so much by the facts themselves as by the complete lack of publicity they’ve received even in the medical press, never mind general interest publications.
Some Lancet readers commenting on the paper doubted the trial methodology involved, which is fair enough: medical researchers have been known to play fast and loose with data subsets. One can still wonder whether the same readers would be as ready to scrutinise the methodology had the results been opposite.
Others mentioned that the findings shouldn’t lead to any far-reaching conclusions. They were in no doubt that, as ‘our planet’ continued to overheat, the situation would reverse.
In other words, what may hypothetically happen in 100 years is more real to them than what is actually and demonstrably happening now.
As to the popular press, its loquacity on the research matched the dinnertime din at a Trappist refectory. Not a word was breathed, which is why the bet offered in the title above is safe.
I shan’t try to offer any conjecture on the likely frontpage headlines should the paper have shown it’s extreme heat that kills 80 times as many Britons. I’ll leave that to your imagination – mine isn’t fecund enough.
What interests me is the subtle ways in which propaganda can work. The tools it employs can vary from ear-splitting noise to pin-drop silence, and sometimes it’s the latter that can have the greater effect.
Ever since the anti-capitalist animus was first channelled into the conduit of the global warming fraud, activists have routinely blown certain data out of proportion while hushing up some others. For example, they’d select a short recent period that showed a steady rise in temperatures, while eschewing the proper method of analysing climate historically.
Thus the general public remains blissfully unaware of long periods in the past when global temperatures were considerably higher than now. The Roman and Medieval Warming Periods are prime examples, and not many people drove diesel-powered SUVs in those days.
The techniques involved are familiar to every adman, a group I happen to know rather well, having been one myself for 30 years. The advertising profession has a code of practice that makes it impossible to lie, which is to cite false information in support of promotional claims.
Yet the same code says nothing about deceiving: failing to disclose information that contradicts the claims made. On the contrary, admen who do so successfully are widely praised for their professional acumen (look up such terms as USP and Preemptive Benefit, both prime examples of such laudable trickery).
Then again, one expects nothing less from chaps trying to flog their wares. Hoping that a salesman will highlight the downside of his product would be presuming too much on human goodness. But in the not so distant past we did expect our mainstream media to present a balanced view of any serious subject.
That expectation has gone the way of all flesh. Nowadays our papers practise all the same tricks that are so profitably used in advertising. But if admen act according to their remit, journalists betray theirs.
Propaganda has replaced much of the reporting and most of the commentary. And people lap it up like thirsty puppies. The more energetic among them read about the imminent death of ‘our planet’ being slowly fried by greedy capitalists and join the ranks of Just Stop Oil and other such saboteurs.
The same friend who told me about the research paper also mentioned that a former editor of The Lancet was among the 30 people arrested for blocking Lambeth Bridge last October.
I wonder what the editors of The Guardian and The Mirror were doing. Slashing car tyres?
“A scientist who filtered out facts contrary to some preferred theory of cancer would be regarded as a disgrace and discredited, while an engineer who filtered out certain facts in building a bridge would be prosecuted for criminal negligence… Intellectuals [or journalists] who take it upon themselves to filter facts, in the interest of their own vision, are denying to others the right they claim for themselves, to look at the world as it is and reach their own conclusions.” Thomas Sowell in “Filering Reality”.
In a recent conversation with someone who claimed to have “done all the research” and has vowed to devote himself (well, part time, on occasion) to reversing the trend, I asked how the fact that Scotland used to be warm enough to grow grapes fit into the global warming narative. While acknowledging it is odd, he declared it did not change the fact that anthropogenic global warming is destroying the earth. Facts will not divert the righteous from their cause. The right facts that is, not those pesky facts that prove otherwise.
Sewell is one of the wisest men currently living, with his mind untouched by any ideology. Those who allow their thinking to be sullied by an ideological bias, will always be impervious to facts. I remember talking to a young(ish) woman about something metaphysical, a subject in which I was somewhat better-versed than she was. She heard me out patiently and summed up by saying: “I’ll never change my opinion”. ‘Never’ is a rather committal word, but she was indeed committed (although not in the way she should have been).
“I’ll NEVER change my opinion.” And I am sure she was proud of that. She probably came upon it honestly, uninformed as it was by facts. But after being schooled on the subject and learning why her opinion was incorrect, she proudly proclaimed she will never change. Any reasonable person would consider the new information and perhaps do some more investigation to get at the truth. But the phrase “every man is entitled to his opinion” has mated with the idea that all men are created equal to birth the dreck that all opinions are equally valid. Even more important today is that all opinions are inclusive – as long as we understand inclusive means furthering the cause of the state and the progressives.