The Lancet published the chart on left with a different X-Axis to downplay fact that cold causes ten times more deaths than heat in Europe. Björn Lomborg corrected that with the chart on right.
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The sheer dishonesty of it allJuly 23rd, 2023 |
 47 comments to The sheer dishonesty of it all |
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Yes. In fact I’m surprised it only 10X.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
-Unknown
I in no way accept the global warming scam. But in the interest of fairness:
The article does clearly state in its findings “we estimated an annual excess of 203 620 … deaths attributed to cold and 20 173 … attributed to heat”, and the rest of the article is more clear about the difference. It is easier to paint a false portrayal with pictures than with the data presented in their raw form.
If the authors wanted to make the differences in heat deaths between countries clear (it is less obvious in the graph on the right), they should have put the graphs in separate graphics instead of scaling the heat deaths up and making them seem comparable to cold deaths.
They are really worried about excess deaths from imaginary global warming, I wonder how long excess deaths will all be attributed to global warming with no investigation into any other possibility (e.g. covid vaccines).
Don’t they blame the cold on global warming these days anyway? I thought the new term du jour was “global climate change” precisely for this reason.
Remember, children: if it’s hot or cold, if it’s wet or dry, if it’s calm or windy – that’s the climate changing because we haven’t let the bien-pensants take charge of our lives.
Don’t blame the statisticians. We spend significant amounts of time ranting about misleading graphics to anyone who’ll listen and, to be fair, it’s often not the authors but, rather, benighted graphic designers who perpetrate these monstrosities.
Also, see Colli’s point.
The fact that excess cold deaths are much larger than excess heat deaths has been known for a long time and was, IIRC, publicised by Lomborg in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.
I have to start with a correction to your post – it should read “X axis”, not “Y axis”.
Colli and Clovis Sangrail, it’s true that the Lancet’s graph is labelled as having different scales in the “cold” and “hot” directions, so they cannot exactly said to be concealing it. It is also true that graphic designers are sometimes so keen to make a graph look pretty on the page that they end up making it misleading. But it is funny how often, when the topic is global warming, the failures to present numerical information properly all seem to happen in the direction that looks most scary.
I also note that even with the scale on the left being five times larger on the left than the right, they still can’t make the excess death rate per 100,000 person-years as a result of heat look larger than that for cold!
Seem to be playing that down nowadays, since it was clear that nobody was buying their bullshit.
We live in a world dominated by lies – but it is vitally important to remember that not everything the establishment say is a lie.
If we fall into the trap of thinking everything the establishment say is a lie – then we go down the rabbit hole that Tucker Carlson (and many others – it is most certainly not just him) fell down – “The establishment say there are no space aliens, that means there are”! “The establishment say the CIA did not murder President Kennedy – therefore they did!” “The establishment say that Putin is the aggressor in Ukraine – therefore he must be the good guy, fighting against bioweapon labs and Ukrainian Nazis!” – I am NOT mocking such people – I understand only too well how being constantly lied to – about Covid (so many people died because of establishment lies), about the 2020 election (which was blatantly rigged), about the international totalitarian ESG and DEI agenda, about historic temperature data….. about so many things, can drive a person to distraction.
Surrounded by lies, and by persecution for anyone who opposes the lies, it is all too easy to assume that everything the establishment say is a lie – but that is not the case, sometimes they are telling the truth. Each case must be examined with an open mind – are the establishment lying again, or are they telling the truth about this particular thing.
It is incredibly difficult – if only the establishment always told the truth, or always lied, the world would be a much simpler place – but sometimes they lie, and sometimes they tell the truth.
As for the C02 is evil theory – if the establishment, such as the Economist magazine – but indeed the international Corporate State generally, believed in this theory (as they say they do) they would support ending imports from China – which produces more CO2 emissions than anywhere else (by a vast margin). It obviously does not make sense to heap costs, via taxes and regulations, on producers and consumers in the West if, by doing so, you are just handing production to the People’s Republic of China Communist Party Dictatorship – and indeed, world C02 emissions, have gone up-and-up (the exact opposite of what the establishment say they want).
The Economist magazine, and the rest of the establishment, do NOT support ending imports from the People’s Republic of China – the establishment go to their beach front homes (What about sea level rise? How can they get mortgages and house insurance if the seas are going to drown these areas?), travel around on jet aircraft (why not use video conferencing?) and pretend to believe in the C02 is evil theory – they obviously do not really believe in the theory, on this they are lying.
Paul:
To be fair, I must say that I am of the opinion the CIA had JFK assassinated. I agree with your other points.
@Natalie
I couldn’t agree more. It is the most extraordinary coincidence!
And even with the rigged axis, the “Total” bar for cold is still larger.
But “The Science is Settled”…
“…sometimes they are telling the truth…”
Indeed, but if so, it’s usually by accident…
Still your point is well taken.
Instead of immediately suspending them all from the petard of disbelief all the time, one should check, verify and research—no, never trust—and then wait a certain period of time (three days? a week? a year? a generation?) before deciding that what’s being served up is elaborately packaged deception…or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, merely earnestly dishonest GIGO.
If one’s patient enough.
Don’t get me wrong. I wish it were otherwise, I really do….
Orange and red weather maps are one of the latest weapons in the climate change propaganda war. My hope is that the blatant lying has now reached the level were even the most uncritical minds will be thinking “Hang on…that can’t be right surely?”
Now do the second- and third-order effect deaths, not just the ones we can blame on things like freezing to death. Rising food costs, resulting in malnutrition? How about those?
The dishonesty here isn’t just in how they’re presenting the information, but in where they are drawing the lines in terms of causation and the effects. How many elderly Britons are dying every year because they can’t afford to heat their homes to a survivable level of warmth? How many get sick and go into hospital because they’ve had their immune systems run down by living in the cold, and not being able to afford proper nutrition and heat at the same time?
A pox on all of their houses. They lie incessantly, and without shame.
JohnK I disagree.
See Brian Latell’s “Castro’s Secrets”.
The Agency was useless – most of its agents (agents not officers) were really working for the other side.
About the only forecast that the BBC puts out these days that isn’t infected by alarmism, as far as I know, is the radio Shipping Forecast. Mariners are a fairly unemotional lot, and they want to know what is the state of the sea and the weather.
RE: Kennedy assassination.
I don’t know what happened there, but there are enough anomalies in the record to make me nearly certain that the “conventional wisdom” almost certainly contains considerable lies and distortions.
Kennedy was a terrible president, and would have been remembered far differently absent his martyrdom in Dallas. The reality is that he was a venal opportunist with ties to organized crime who likely got into office via electoral fraud. His actions, once in office? Horrendous. He was drugged out of his mind for the first years of his administration, and they had to dry him out before he did anything really stupid. The venal way he and his brother went about dealing with South Vietnam’s Diem set the stage for the excresence that was the Vietnam War, which his party promptly disowned and then when Nixon effectively ended it in a victory, chose to betray the 50,000 dead soldiers they caused by abandoning military support for South Vietnam.
Frankly, I could be persuaded that whoever assassinated Kennedy did America a huge favor. Granted, they probably should have also taken out LBJ simultaneously, but…
Leaving the dodgy graphics aside, which is hardly news, the thing that I actually learned from this top notch Streisand effect effort is that you have to try really really hard to die an excess heat death.
@Lee Moore,
No. No, you do not. Heat exhaustion is the one thing that scares the hell out of me when managing jobsites and being responsible for other people. Cold, they’ll generally get the hell out of, although cold weather injuries are another thing that idiots will try and “work through”. Frostbite and so forth generally won’t kill you, although heat will. And, once they’ve gone far enough into it and aren’t sweating any more? Getting them back intact is almost impossible. Most of the guys I’ve observed who’ve worked themselves into heat stroke were never the same afterwards, and it’s alarmingly easy to do. There’s a state akin to the delusional exposure deal where you think you’re overheating while you’re actually dying from hypothermia, and the guys who get to that point are usually presenting as “OK” right up until they drop. They aren’t even aware of it, themselves, until it’s too damn late.
People from Northern Europe don’t see real hot weather enough to really have the experience or even half a clue about it all. I stumbled onto some stranded British and German tourists out in the Mojave near Death Valley, once upon a time, and all of them were out in the heat of the mid-day, didn’t have enough water, and weren’t even really aware of the warning signs. I drew them to the attention of the park rangers, and left them with water, but… You want to talk overconfidence about something they had no experience with? That was them; only had a couple of bottles of water and nothing at all that had any salt or electrolytes in it. They should have left for that day’s adventure in the desert with at least five gallons of water per person, but… Nope. No idea at all about the risks they were taking.
I’d honestly say that while cold kills more people, it’s a lot easier to slip into hyperthermia than many people think. If you’re not someone who’s lived in a desert environment, you often have no idea of the unique risks of that environment, and you’ll do things that will kill you. Same with living in a region that goes through a heat wave; you’ll think “Oh, it’s just a little hotter than normal…” and completely miss the signs that you’re slipping away into a state you can’t get back from. Especially if you’re not even aware of them.
Had heat stroke in Egypt doing the Nile Egyptology tour. That doesn’t say sorry.
Took me 2 days to recover.
In 2019, I went to Bonneville for Speed Week. Leaving the course one evening, still above 100F, we looked way out over the flats and saw a lone vehicle, obviously stuck, with occupants. After a bit of dithering, my buddy and I decided we had to stop and help. Smart enough not to leave the established roadway on the salt, we drew straws (as it were) and I lost, so I got to trek a mile over the salt to see what was up. I still think his story of recent cancer surgery was a pretty weak excuse.
It was a rented BMW X5, driven by a Chinese postgraduate from UCLA and containing his 60-year-old mother, fresh off the plane from China. He’d driven out onto the salt despite all the warnings he got at the gate at the end of the road, and the signs, and the Speed Week radio station, broken through, and now the car was both-axles-deep in the goop that’s under the salt, which smells of a million dead dinosaurs and has the consistency of peanut butter. He’d also burned the transmission in the Beemer, trying to get it out, and now (as good Kraut cars will do) it was refusing to start or do anything else. No water, no A/C, no provisions, no nothing.
I was fit-enough, healthy, properly-dressed and well-hydrated, and it was a tough slog, both ways. I carried lots of water. By the time we got these two back to the road, into the shade and hydrated, I was seriously-concerned for their well-being – they were both in-extremis. I wasn’t doing so well, myself. Fortunately, the SCTA folks had gotten revved up in the meantime and there was A/C, water and medical aid waiting for them. It took 2 hours for the SnoCat to pull the car out and bring it to where a rollback could load it, by which time, they were doing OK.
That’s a mile away from 50,000 people, in plain sight. Heat exhaustion is no joke. Had the flats been deserted (as they are 46 weeks of the year) they would have died out there.
That being said, if it had happened in a similar way, in February, on I94 between Bismarck and Dickinson, they would likely also have died. Neither too much cold, nor too much heat, is anything to take lightly.
llater,
llamas
@ Paul Marks, July 24, 2023 at 8:14 am, @JohnK July 24, 2023 at 10:44 am
Regarding the Kennedy assassination, this is examined in great detail in a book called Fry The Brain (The Art of Urban Sniping) by John West. Long story short, it was the Mafia with multiple gunmen and support.
DO NOT order the book from your local politically correct library (for obvious reasons).
Tell ’em you’re ANTIFA or BLM. They’ll probably get it for you for free.
Kirk – as you know, President Kennedy was dying of Addison’s Disease and was dependent on drugs (legal and illegal), this is why “LBJ” went around telling people “I am going to be President soon” – not because he was planning on having President Kennedy killed (he was not) – but because he knew that Jack Kennedy could not carry on much longer and would have to resign (or be removed) on health grounds.
There is a similar situation right now – Mr Biden is not medically fit (he is not mentally capable) for the office he holds.
The Cabinet Office holders know perfectly well that Mr Biden has lost his mind – but they would rather have a puppet “President Biden” (who they control) than a “President Harris”.
Fry The Brain (The Art of Urban Sniping) by John West.
DO NOT order the book from your local politically correct library (for obvious reasons). Instead download a free copy from here:
https://archive.org/details/FryTheBrainTheArtOfUrbanSniping
I have the print book and the illustrations in the book are poor so it isn’t a fault of the PDF (which is remarkably clean for the Archive.org).
I love the little break lines between 40 & 250 on the death rate axis… you know, so the overall extent is the same!
Paul:
Obviously you are entitled to your view about the CIA and JFK.
However, the agency had a dedicated assassination squad (ZR:Rifle) based in Mexico City, and JFK was “guarded” by 9 hung over Secret Service agents. The hit was not difficult.
As for Lee Harvey Oswald, I am persuaded he was part of the “false defector programme” designed to find out intelligence about the closed world of the USSR. After that, he was a very low level intelligence asset and a useful patsy when the time came.
JohnK
Why bother to kill a man, Jack Kennedy, who would have had to resign (or be removed on health grounds) anyway?
Mr Oswald was a Marxist – that much is plain.
As for the Secret Service agents – one was stone cold sober, as he was a Mormon and had not been to the strip club. He was not called to testify before the Warren Commission.
It is sometimes claimed that this agent put a rifle bullet in the back of President Kennedy’s head – but not deliberately, the agent was not familiar with that sort of rifle and raised it in a hurry when Mr Oswald opened fire (the rifle may have gone off).
As I have said, this agent was not called upon to testify – as a Mormon in 1963 he would not have been willing to lie, and to reveal that one of the bullets that hit President Kennedy came from a Secret Service rifle would have been embarrassing to the government.
As for killing President Kennedy in revenge for his treachery at the “Bay of Pigs” (and it was a betrayal) – that sounds much more like something Paul Marks might have done (in a fit of rage), rather than the professional (and rather cynical) officers of the CIA.
And I can assure everyone that I did not do it – I was not even born at the time.
The other misdirection is the recent use of “pumping” CO2 into the atmosphere. It’s not pumped, it’s *EMMITTED*, and until very very recently, that was indeed the phrasing used. But of course “CO2 emissions” isn’t scary enough, it has to be “CO2 *PUMPED!!111!!!!!* into the atmosphere”.
I’d be shocked, but I gave up on The Lancet as a serious, impartial publication around the time of the Iraq War with their repeated scaremongering around Scary Depleted Uranium.
They’ve been agenda-based hacks for decades now.
And The Baby Ed Tufte is crying about this graph, for sure.
Paul:
OK, only 8 of JFK’s protection detail were hung over!
I give no credence to the theory that JFK was accidentally shot by a Secret Service agent with an AR15, simply because no-one saw it happen. The AR15 was in the back up car though, a witness saw it when the cars stopped under the railway bridge. He was disbelieved for years because the SS lied about having it there. The same witness also saw a man with a rifle behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. So we now know he told the truth about seeing the AR15, but not the other rifle?
I don’t believe Oswald was a Marxist, I think the evidence points more to him being a low level intelligence asset posing as a Marxist. That’s my take on the evidence.
JFK’s health was poor, as you said. That does mean he would not have won in 1964 and served until 1968. For those opposed to his policies of detente with the USSR and pulling out of Vietnam, he had to be stopped.
The thing that militates against the CIA or anyone else in the US government having been in charge of assassinating Kennedy is the rather high degree of competency they’d have had to demonstrate in order for it to have happened the way it did, and then kept everything under cover for this long. It ain’t exactly like they’ve managed much else competently, now is it?
Also, like the supposedly faked moon landings, do you really want to try and convince people that a.) the Soviets wouldn’t have found out about it, and that b.) they would have kept silent on the issue? Really? What, you’re positing “honor among thieves” as a factor? Professional courtesy between spy agencies? LOL… Yeah, pull the other one; it’s got bells on.
There are anomalies with both Kennedy’s deaths. Won’t argue that; will argue that for anyone to propose and maintain that there was some sort of high-level conspiracy that made both happen, even separately? And, kept it hidden? Just not seeing it; they’ve demonstrated so much more general incompetence and venality that I’m virtually certain that if there was a “they” behind it all, it likely would have come out by now.
Most likely explanation? Things went very wrong, on both days, and in unexpected ways. Reality has a way of being entirely implausible… Who would dare write a novel where Todd Lincoln gets saved from death at a train station by the older brother of his father’s assassin, himself a famous actor, and that Todd Lincoln would be in close proximity to two other presidents when they were assassinated…?
No idea what the hell actually happened. I’d lay you long odds that if someone did tell me exactly what went down, and who was responsible? I’d probably find it entirely unbelievable, and so would everyone else. Sad, but true.
Kirk:
At that time the CIA was rather good at arranging coups and assassinating people. I doubt they could pull it off now, I imagine that the Company, like everywhere else, is full of diversity hires and ESG consultants.
But in 1963 it was full of men who had cut their teeth in WWII and spent the 50s taking down unfriendly governments and taking out unfriendly heads of state. So if they genuinely thought JFK was a threat to national security, it is easy to see that it would become, in their minds, their duty to take him out.
It did not have to be a big plot, a few dozen men could carry it out. Kennedy’s security was a joke. It would have been easier to assassinate the President of the USA than the President of the average banana republic.
@JohnK,
You need to read more widely and talk to people who were actually around and engaged with those idiots in that period. I’ve friends who were in Special Forces during that era, and the vast majority of them regarded anything the CIA was involved with as being childishly inept and generally feckless.
Doubt me? Look at the record of the Castro assassination attempts, or the ludicrous effort to invade Cuba and Tibet. Those morons got more people killed through sheer idiocy than just about anything you can imagine. Then, they wrote books about what smart people they were…
There were pockets of competence, just as there are today. The entire system, however? I seriously doubt that they could have pulled something as elaborate as assassinating Kennedy off without leaving clear indicators of what they’d done.
Anyone militating for the idea that the CIA and/or the FBI had significant involvement in the assassination has to first convince me that they somehow pulled it off and then managed to conceal it all these years. They signally didn’t manage it anywhere else, sooooo… Yeah. I will continue to cast doubts on the entire idea.
Cover-up? Yeah; they have had to be involved. Actual, y’know… Pulling the trigger? Nope. Not seeing it. It’s like positing that the US Navy was involved in blowing up Nordstream; if they had been, I guarantee you that by now, someone in the Navy would have come forward with a book about it, especially if there were SEAL team members involved… Those arrogant jackasses can’t avoid talking about things, at all. Too much ego built into their world, I’m afraid…
Kirk:
As I said, killing the President of the United States was not a particularly difficult proposition back then, and well within the capabilities of the Mexico City assassination squad. Castro, on the other hand, had rather more in the way of security.
Sure but actually keeping it secret? Sorry but there is not a single US govt agency capable of that.
I’d like to think that the CIA and FBI were that competent, and capable of keeping secrets that long, but… The track record is not good.
You’d have to first posit and then prove that what we’ve seen out of the CIA and FBI over the last many years is a false front of deliberate incompetence and sloth; that there’s a hidden core of competence that has left no sign of its existence.
Which I really doubt is the case. At. All.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
-Unknown
Not “unknown” at all. Mark Twain said that, and he is well known.
The CIA ? “The Agency was useless” And is useless. Always was useless. It’s the commies’ propaganda that made a big deal of it. Which, like anything communist – is a pack of lies.
Perry & Kirk:
The trouble is, when a retired Company man like E Howard Hunt, contemplating death, admitted that he knew of the plot to kill Kennedy (but insisted he did not take part in it, naturally), no-one took any notice. It is dismissed as a lie.
Kirk:
I agree with you that South Vietnam could have been saved by US air power in 1975. Those massed ranks of T55s were begging for air strikes. But the US seemed determined to abandon their ally. Ditto Afghanistan, and the Taliban didn’t even have tanks.
JohnK,
I have trouble seeing the guy who was in charge of Nixon’s “Plumbers” as being either competent or reliable. In fact, considering that Watergate was really more a deep-state coup, what with Deep Throat being a pissed-off FBI figure, Mark Felt? I’d have to class Hunt as a total dumbf*ck that, like General Flynn, worked in the system for years but never learned enough about it to be able to keep himself out of trouble with it. Not the brightest light on the Christmas tree, ya know?
On top of that, he only says he “heard” of the assassination plot. So? All these idiots testifying before Congress on UFOs are similarly informed… Someone told them something. We’ve yet to have anybody who actually saw these supposed craft and bodies say anything publicly, so I have to wonder whether or not we’re being gaslit by people who fell for watercooler conversations in the office as being “real”.
Ya make extraordinary claims, you need to back them up with extraordinary evidence. Which I suspect ain’t coming in either Kennedy’s or the UFO cases. Call me cynical, but I just don’t see it having been the case… Occam’s Razor, and all that. I’d buy an interlocking set of misadventures leading up to Kennedy getting shot in Dallas, long before I’ll buy some cabal of unusually competent CIA and FBI conspirators who’ve managed to stay hidden for all these years.
Do note the exact same playbook being used in both cases. By the same people… Biden (or, whoever is running his ass) did exactly the same thing to the Afghani government that they did to the South Vietnamese, right down to the surreptitious withdrawal of key logistics and aviation enablers. The Afghan Army knew they were being abandoned months before the Taliban came in, and responded accordingly.
The parallels between South Vietnam and Afghanistan are so clearly lined up that you can’t miss it, once you go looking. But, the media wants to sell “defeat”, and here we are. Betrayed by our own politicians…
Kirk:
According to Hunt, he was invited to join the plot, but claims he declined. Whether he did or not is moot.
He did lose a libel case he brought against a magazine which claimed he was involved. It turns out he was one of the few people who could not remember where they were when Kennedy was shot.
But I am glad you think Watergate was a coup. So do I. Nixon was lucky inasmuch as two assassinations in ten years would have been too much. I think his policies of detente with China and the USSR may have been the root cause.
I happen to think that the coup against Nixon happened because Mark Felt and the other coterie of FBI agents running the Bureau were miffed that Nixon had the temerity to bring in an outsider, rather than promote one of them from within.
Nixon fell more because he was like Trump; he trusted the bastards to do their Constitutional duty.
Kirk:
Felt was indeed Deep Throat. There was a concerted attempt to set up the plot against Nixon. The story was first dangled to the New York Times, who did not take the bait, then the Washington Post.
The so-called Plumbers were guys who were or had been CIA assets, and were expendable. The break-in at the Watergate was ridiculous, and the taping and retaping of the doors was surely too stupid to be accidental. Just my opinion.
Nixon was removed because he allowed the Felts of the government to have a chance to do so. He simply forgot “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” and in his paranoia and whatever other ego issues he had, he just couldn’t look America in the eye and say “I screwed up”.
The bigger problem is the Felts and FBI and the like are so pervasive that it would literally take removing the entire Federal (and most state, county, and city) governments from the root up at this point. We’re seeing the end result of two centuries of corruption and government getting into bed with big business coming to a head. It’s simply too far gone to fix at this point, and even then, what happens after that? Liberty isn’t valued, the demographics have been so altered in last 40 years and are never going back, business is so international now with no real domestic manufacturing these days, and so on. And I can’t imagine it’s much better in Europe or Australia. And it is all by design of people we can’t even identify beyond vague “they” titles. We could remove every elected official and member of the WEF and we’d be right back where we are now a week later.