Freedom of speech: Stuart Kirk resigns as head of HSBC sustainable investing.

Back in May we reported on the suspension of Stuart Kirk, who dropped some truth bombs about climate finance at a Times newspaper conference. Stuart has now resigned his post, and issued this statement:

Today I wish to announce that I have resigned as global head of responsible investing at HSBC Asset Management.

Ironically given my job title, I have concluded that the bank’s behaviour towards me since my speech at a Financial Times conference in May has made my position, well, unsustainable.

Funny old world.

Over a 27-year unblemished record in finance, journalism and consulting I have only ever tried to do the best for my clients and readers, knowing that doing so helps my employer too.

Investing is hard. So is saving our planet. Opinions on both differ. But humanity’s best chance of success is open and honest debate. If companies believe in diversity and speaking up, they need to walk the talk. A cancel culture destroys wealth and progress.

There is no place for virtue signalling in finance. Likewise as a writer, researcher and investor, I know that words or trading shares can only achieve so much. True impact comes from the combination of real-world action and innovative solutions.

Which is why I’ve been gathering a crack group of like-minded individuals together to deliver what is arguably the greatest sustainable investment idea ever conceived. A whole new asset class. Sounds fanciful – but I am not one for hyperbole, as viewers of my presentation know well.

To be announced later this year, the first project will underline the central argument in my speech: that human ingenuity can and will overcome the challenges ahead, while at the same time offering huge investment opportunities.

Meanwhile, I will continue to prod with a sharp stick the nonsense, hypocrisy, sloppy logic and group-think inside the mainstream bubble of sustainable finance. Follow me on LinkedIn if you want to learn the right way to think about ESG – and let me tell you, most of what’s out there is bonkers.

Finally, can I take this opportunity to thank the tens of thousands of people – from chief executives and congressmen to scientists and mom and pop investors – who contacted me from around the world offering their support and solidarity over the past two months.

You have given me strength during what has been a tumultuous time for me and my family. It is for you that the next chapter in my career will be devoted. Please forward this to anyone you know who cares about money and planet earth.

Stuart

Italian Climate Conference Cancelled Lest Skeptics be Heard

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Italian professors and others pointing out inconvenient climate info – whatever next? Hit the cancel button and look the other way!

Science Matters

As reported Robert Wade at Climate Etc.. Cancel culture in climate change a major scientific conference was cancelled because one of 14 papers to be presented was critical of global warming theory.  As Wade stated:

A microcosm on the ‘morality’ of cancel culture: the aborted conference on ‘Global Warming: Mitigation Strategies’, hosted by the Italian scientific academy the Lincei.

Naturally it seems the skeptical paper is nowhere to be found, but the same authors wrote in 2019 to the political leaders of Italy with their concerns, likely a synopsis of their findings.  The text in english comes from an article Top Italian Scientists Debunk “Man-made Global Warming” at panamasynodwatch.  Here is what alarmists found so offensive. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

PETITION ON ‘MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING’
To Your Excellences:

President of the Republic

President of the Senate

President of the Chamber of Deputies

President of the Council

PETITION ON…

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BBC removes Bitesize page on climate change ‘benefits’ after backlash

UK summer 2018 [image credit: BBC]

Hilarious.
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The BBC has removed an educational page laying out the “benefits” of climate change after a furious online reaction, reports The Guardian.

BBC Bitesize, its website for schoolchildren, claimed warmer temperatures “could lead to healthier outdoor lifestyles” and that a benefit of climate change could mean easier access to oil in Alaska and Siberia.

Facebook announces UK trial to ‘tackle’ climate misinformation

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Tackle – or generate? Carbon dioxide being a benefit to plants – which it clearly is – will be deemed false if it’s ‘excess’, according to this report. Anything that might cast doubt on climate catastrophism is likely to get the label treatment.
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Labels to be attached to posts directing users to Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center, reports The Guardian.

A new section of the Climate Science Information Center, launching alongside the labelling trial, debunks common myths such as the false claim that polar bear populations are not suffering due to global heating, or the widespread belief that excess carbon emissions help plant life.

Facebook is working with climate communication experts from around the world, including at the University of Cambridge, to produce the content.

Dr Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge academic who has worked with Facebook on the centre, said: “The spread of damaging falsehoods endangers the level of international cooperation required to prevent catastrophic global warming.

“Facebook is in a unique position to counter the circulation of online misinformation, and the new climate ‘myth-busting’ section is an important step toward debunking dangerous falsehoods.”

Full report here.

The crackdown on wrongthink: be prepared.

The big tech oligarchs have seized the moment and are purging social media platforms. The Twaliban have been suspending pro-Trump accounts (including the US president himself) and FakeSpook are following suit and forcing a new user agreement on WhatsApp users allowing Zuck to harvest their private data. Google and Apple have removed alternative chat platform Parler from their app stores.

A better, more secure messaging platform called Signal should now be used by people who care about free speech and privacy. More info in this article from Wired.

A guessing game for climate data experienced sceptics.

I’m not writing anything in this post which will get it automatically flagged up to our blog hosts or anyone else. Look at the images and see what you think.

Figure 1. Incomplete teaser from the ONS, and my inductive reasoning.

Report suggests SUVs are a health risk, or equivalent to one

Image credit: Carbuyer

A ‘climate think tank’ proposes trying to choke off SUV demand by banning adverts, but the most obvious advert is the vehicle that’s already on the road, visible to all. This report claims ‘soaring sales for electric vehicles’, but the actual numbers are tiny compared to total sales of all propulsion types – especially SUVs.
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A new report draws parallels between the ban on tobacco advertising and changed behaviors, says Greenbiz.

The United Kingdom should ban the advertising of sports utility vehicles (SUVs) in order to help drive down transport emissions and accelerate progress towards the country’s net zero goals, a study published this week has urged, drawing parallels with the ban on tobacco advertising and its success in changing behaviors.

Produced by climate think tank the New Weather Foundation, the report highlights how average emissions for new cars sold in the U.K. increased in 2019 for the fourth year in a row.

The same trend has been documented across much of Europe, as soaring sales for electric vehicles and low emission models are more than offset by increased demand for heavier and more polluting SUVs, which made up four in 10 of the U.K.’s new car sales last year.

By contrast, while sales of electric and plug-in hybrid models are growing exponentially, they are doing so from a low base with data from the European Environment Agency showing that fewer than two in every 100 new cars are fully electric.

The growth in SUV sales comes alongside increased advertising expenditure to promote the vehicles, the study adds, a marketing strategy that appears to run in conflict with the stated decarbonization ambitions of some of the world’s biggest car firms.

The study highlights the example provided Ford, which has set a net zero emissions target and promised to invest $11.5 billion in developing electric models through to 2022, but has at the same time stepped up efforts to promote its most high carbon models.

From September 2016 to September 2018, Ford went from a roughly 50/50 split in U.S. advertising spend between cars and SUVs/pickup trucks, to spending 85 percent on the latter, in pursuit of the higher profit margins provided by larger vehicles, the study notes.

Full article: We banned advertising for cigarettes. Should we do the same for SUVs?

A wetter world as solar grand minimum deepens.

Image credit: Tallbloke

A few days ago I tweeted this comment above some remarkable video of the Three Gorges Dam bypass sluices.

The atmosphere cools and shrinks when the Sun gets sleepy. Rain is wrung out of it like a sponge. We have been entering a solar grand minimum since 2008. The bottom of it will be around 2035. https://t.co/2b6LlanjFH

— Rog Tallbloke 🇬🇧 (@RogTallbloke) July 8, 2020

Among other people, this was picked up by Willis, the warmist at WUWT, who used it as an opportunity to attack the reality of the Sun-climate connection:

Trump Order Confronts Big Tech Bias

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Social media getting its wings clipped? Lawyers should do well out of it.

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

President Trump finally issued an Executive Order targeting viewpoint discrimination by Big Tech social media companies. The Order grows out of Trump’s summit on this thorny issue last July. Topping the list of targets are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Google, but there are many other possibilities.

This form of discrimination is very much uncharted legal territory. The chosen central concept for Big Tech wrongdoing is “censorship”, as the EO is titled “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship”. This choice in itself is a strategic legal decision.

The Order is basically a hunting license for federal agencies. There are two distinct parts. The first is basically laying out a number of legal arguments. If you are not familiar with the legal issues this may seem like empty rhetoric, but it is actually the opposite. The lawyers who wrote this order are preparing to…

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Climate Wars: David v. Goliath in Cyberspace

The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) brings this critique of the big beasts of social media to our attention. Fake impartiality and bullying tactics get exposed again.
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Silicon Valley Goliaths, using the technology and market forces at their disposal, have shut out of the marketplace Davids opposed to their preferred opinions on climate change, says Clarice Feldman @ The Pipeline.

In his 2007 book, An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit, wrote optimistically that an army of ordinary people (“Davids”) could use technology and the market to beat the Goliaths of “Big Media, Big Government and other Goliaths.”

Thirteen years later, big media is on the ropes but the Silicon Valley Goliaths, using the technology and market forces at their disposal, have shut out of the marketplace Davids opposed to their preferred opinions.

MET-Office wants your money for a new supercomputer, but has given up decadal forecasting

Well this is a disappointment.

After the fiasco in 2018 when I revealed the data-shifting technique the MET-Office were using to never be wrong about their ‘decadal’ forecast, and the late update in 2019 , the MET-O have now disappeared the ‘decadal’ forecast altogether. This after they promised to update it in January 2020.

EDIT: The forecast has been found! See comments below.

The Curious Case of Dr. Miskolczi

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Curious indeed. A case of what can happen when the message becomes more important than the science that is supposed to lead to it.

[Note: this post was written in 2017]

Science Matters

Update May 18 below

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button relates the story of a fictional character who is estranged from the rest of humanity because of a unique personal quality. He alone was born an old man, grew younger as he aged, before dying as an infant. Living in contradiction to all others, he existed as an alien whose relations were always temporary and strained.

Recently I had an interchange with a climatist obsessed with radiation and CO2 as the drivers of climate change. For me it occasioned a look back in time to rediscover how I came to some conclusions about how the atmosphere warms the planet. That process brought up an influencial scientist whose name comes up rarely these days in discussions of global warming/climate change. So I thought a tribute post to be timely.

Dr. Ferenc Mark Miskolczi (feh-rent mish-kol-tsi) was not born estranged, but alienation…

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Peter Ridd Wins Court Case

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As the judge rightly said: “The university has ‘played the man and not the ball’”. One report says ‘the University is considering its legal options’.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Dear All,
Excellent news.
My lawyers have told me that the judge handed down his decision and we seem to have won on all counts.
It all happened very quickly and we had no warning , and because I live almost a thousand miles from the court, I was not able to be there. I have still not seen the written judgement and will update you all when I have that information.
Needless to say, I have to thank all 2500 of you, and all the bloggers, and the IPA and my legal team who donated much of their time free for this success. But mostly I want to thank my dearest Cheryl, who quite by chance has been my bestest friend for exactly 40 years today. It just shows what a team effort can achieve.
The next chapter of this saga must now be written by…

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The Long March to #Brexit: Parliament Square Rally

The 50 core marchers strode through London with thousands of people from all over the country behind them and joined the throng in Parliament Square on March 29th. After great speeches from leavers left and right, the man himself topped the bill with a short but inspiring message to all democrats.

It took us 14 days to march from Sunderland to Westminster. This bloke has given 25 years of his life to the cause of regaining independence for the UK. Spare him 8 minutes of your time.

Crying Cowboy’s Censorship Complaint Codswallop

Willis Eschenbach recently complained that I banned him from the talkshop. He makes this complaint, on average, annually. Usually in a comment attacking Dr Ned Nikolov and Dr Karl Zeller.

On the occasions I’ve bothered to respond, I’ve pointed out to Willis that in fact he banned himself from the talkshop, something he maintains is a lie. Below the break is the screenshot of his parting comment, made on the talkshop in mid-January 2012.

Every interaction I’ve had with Willis since has reminded me how fortunate we were that he decided to deprive us of his brilliance.

Lee Harding: Climate conformity may well bury the truth

Credit: nationalreview.com

Stirring up hysteria and issuing threats are well-known tactics of dictators hoping to suppress and discourage clear thinking.

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

Some climate change alarmists have become the Roman Inquisition of the 21st century.

Once again, the Earth is put at the centre of everything, with other issues such as free speech, democracy and scientific freedom relegated to some distant orbit.

Ray Bates: My conclusion stands that SR1.5 is not a scientifically rigorous document

Prof Ray Bates discusses some points raised by a critic in response to his recent analysis of the latest IPCC summary report (SR 1.5).

Reply by Ray Bates to the blog post by Peter Thorne of Maynooth University
H/T The GWPF

A) General comments

1) Prof. Thorne states that my critique of SR1.5 was not peer-reviewed and should not be referred to as a paper.
His statement is incorrect. My critique was peer-reviewed.

I wouldn’t list it in my CV as a journal article, but it is correct to call it a paper (see the Oxford Dictionary). That said, it matters little to me whether my publication is called a critique, a piece, or a paper.

BBC climate change ‘facts’ are fiction

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

‘Move along please, nothing to see here, science is settled’. Is that the BBC’s climate reporting policy? Does controversy have to be swept under the carpet, for fear of upsetting the ‘greenblob’? What happened to their charter duty of impartiality?

H/T The GWPF

In order to avoid giving ‘false balance’ to the climate alarmists at the BBC, I thought it would be a good idea to fact-check their new internal guidance on climate change, writes Harry Wilkinson.

This is their totalitarian memorandum aimed at stamping out free scientific discourse, on the basis that certain facts are established beyond dispute.

The problem is that these ones aren’t, and the BBC is guilty of repeatedly failing to describe accurately the nuances of climate science and the degree to which certain claims are disputed.

BBC Issues New Guidelines To Shut Down Debate On Climate Change

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So this is what impartiality looks like at the BBC. They decide what your opinion should be and suppress or attack any other viewpoints. Pathetic.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Robin Guenier et al

Carbon Brief has obtained details of new BBC guidance on how to handle climate issues:

The BBC, one of the world’s largest and most respected news organisations, has issued formal guidance to its journalists on how to report climate change.

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Censorship and the Climate Clown Show

Tony Heller, AKA Steve Goddard, has put together a 10 minute video exposing the Censorship against those who disagree with the rampant climate alarmism of the left wing establishment. The signatories to the latest clampdown on free speech are listed for posterity below the break.