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As we all shiver in the autumnal weather during what is meant to be summer and some of us have even turned our central heating back on, there is one certainty – in a few weeks time, the liars at the lying Met Office will tell us that we’ve just had the “warmest June on record”. After all, the Met Office made the same claim about miserable May and appalling April. What will be intriguing will be what mathematical contortions the Met Office will use to justify their preposterous nonsense:
will the Met Office have the gall to say that June in the UK was the warmest on record?
or will the Met Office choose somewhere which had decent weather – perhaps Greece or India – to justify their climate catastrophism?
or will the Met Office instead try to fob us off by claiming that, although June in the UK was a disaster, global temperatures (if such a thing can even be measured) were at record levels?
What is normal?
For decades the Met Office has been claiming that temperatures have been higher than normal. But what is ‘normal’. In line with World Meteorological Organization guidelines, climate is measured against 30-year ‘averaging’ periods. Known as ‘climate normal’ periods, these act as a benchmark against which the observational records of weather and climate can be compared to place them into context and as a reference baseline to provide context for future climate projections. The 30-year periods begin on 1st January of a year ending with the digit 1. Up till 2020, the base period – what we’re told is ‘normal’ – was the period from 1961 to 1990. Hopefully some readers will remember that from 1960 to at least 1980 the Earth cooled so much that even the experts at the climate-catastrophist Guardian assured us a new Ice Age was on the way:
So, it’s hardy surprising that temperatures have been rising since the 30-year reference period included at least 20 years of bitterly cold weather. Thus all claims up till 1990 that the Earth was warming are more likely to be just variations in a natural cycle of cooling and warming rather than a climate catastrophe caused by human activities.
The latest 30-year period ended on 31 December 2020. The Met Office now uses 1991-2020 as the reference ‘normal’ for routine UK climate monitoring. However, the 1961-1990 reference will be retained for the monitoring of longer-term climate change.
Can any temperature measured be trusted?
Until the 1991 to 2020 reference period ended, the climate doomsters could be pretty confident that most days, weeks, months and years would be warmer than what the Met Office used as ‘normal’ But now we have a new, warmer reference period, the Met Office has a new trick. This is to claim that a certain place or day or month or whatever has been “the hottest since records began”. I haven’t checked, but I have a vague memory of the year 1884 being the year ‘when records began’. But don’t quote me on that.
Now let’s think of what might have changed since 1884. Hmmm. In 1884 the UK population was around 30 million. Now it’s about 70 million:
More people means more buildings, more cars, more jet planes, more central heating, more everything except for tranquil places with peace and quiet and no multi-cultural enrichment.
Here’s just one of the many places where the Met Office measures our country’s temperature:
The temperatures is measured at the red mark. You’ll see that its between an airport runway and a road. I believe that this began to be used in 1959. And I wonder whether since 1959 there are fewer or more jet planes taking off from this airport and whether there are fewer or more cars driving past. I suspect the answer to both conundrums is ‘more’. More planes and more cars mean more heat.
If I remember correctly England’s hottest ever days were recorded next to an RAF airbase where Typhoon jets were taking off and landing and in a very sheltered botanical garden in Cambridge which was being turned into a furnace by the heat from airconditioning from surrounding office buildings and laboratories. Scotland’s hottest ever day was at a temperature measuring station which happened to have an ice cream van parked nearby pumping out hot air from its cooling system.
The WMO Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land was formally introduced from 2014, enabling us to make broad comparisons of our weather and climate stations with those around the world. These WMO classifications focus on the exposure of an observed element at a site, with a Class 1 assessment being the highest standard and Class 5 the lowest. Class 1 stations would be the most reliable and Classes 4 and 5 pretty worthless. Unfortunately for us, fewer than 10% of the UK’s monitoring stations are Class 1. The huge majority are Class 4 or Class 5:
Class 4 and Class 5 observation stations are likely to be affected by increased urbanisation, more traffic, more heat from buildings and so on. In short, they are more likely to give much higher temperature readings than they should due to the Urban Heat Island Effect.
So, next time the Met Office or the BBC or C4 News or any of the bought mainstream media gravely informs you that we are experiencing the hottest day or week or month or whatever ‘since records began’, you should probably take these claims with a Siberian salt mine of salt.
I’m a bit busy as I’m trying to edit a book which has been supposedly translated from Korean into English. I suspect that the publishers have used a new AI (Artificial Intelligence) all-whizzing all-dancing translation programme. The result is over 300 pages (80,000 words) of gibberish. Why I suspect this is that a couple of months ago I got a message from Amazon Kindle pointing out that there was one typo in my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS. Clearly Amazon Kindle are not employing people to read through every book published. So Amazon Kindle must be using some kind of AI proofreading programme. The reason I believe that a proofreading programme is being used is that the suggested changes to my typo are much more gramatically incorrect than the original typo.
However, the fact that these translation and proofreading programmes, although not yet perfect, are now starting to appear does suggest that once the West has lost most of its manufacturing jobs to China and India and Vietnam, the next phase of the West’s impoverishment will be the loss of millions of white-collar jobs to AI.
Anyway, I’ll try to keep my blog going while I do the rewriting of the book I’ve offered to clean up.
The Crazy Water fun park
Here’s a nice photo of people enjoying themselves at the Crazy Water fun park:
But where do you think the Crazy Water fun park is? Some Spanish holiday resort? Somewhere in Greece? Or maybe even Florida or California?
Actually, it was in Gaza. You remember Gaza? That’s the place the lefties and the BBC and Queers for Palestine keep telling us is the world’s worst concentration camp.
Because I’m pushed for time, I’ll leave it up to the brilliant Simon Webb to explain what has really caused the Gaza disaster. And it’s not Israel:
I have just noticed that Amazon are discounting paperback copies of my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS from the normal price of £8.44 to £7.44. So, if you buy a copy now, you can save a whole £1. You could even donate that £1 to Reform.
Let them all in!
I have been trying to cut down on how much alcohol I drink. But I’m afraid I reverted back to heavy alcohol abuse while watching the Sunak/Starmer supposed debate and the BBC’s follow-up with six political pygmies trotting out their carefully-prepared and endlessly-rehearsed attack lines. Though I did enjoy Lord Admiral Penny ‘the sword’ Mordant and flame-haired lefty temptress Angie ‘loads of homes’ Rayner battering away at each other. It was almost as much fun as watching two scantily-clothed babes mud-wrestling. As for Farage, I imagine he would rather have been down the pub than having to listen to 90 minutes of inane lying garbage from the established political parties.
For me the most shocking detail of the BBC’s Friday evening political debate was that the majority (perhaps even all) the bozos the BBC chose as a supposedly ‘representative’ audience were supporters of mass immigration and horrified when Nigel Farage said something like “Open the borders! Let them all in!“
The migrant-hugging audience put me in mind of a 10-year-old video by an American university professor showing the utter futility of believing that swamping the West with the Third World will somehow improve the lot of mankind.
You only really need to watch the first 2-3 minutes of the video to get the picture:
I was watching part of the D-Day ceremony on GB News yesterday and noticed a story on the ‘breaking news’ strip below the main image. Seven men had just been convicted of rape against two underage girls in the 2000s. I noticed that three of the seven were called ‘Mohammed’ and the other four had ‘exotic’, possibly slightly foreign names like ‘Yasser’, ‘Abid’, ‘Tahir’ and ‘Ramin’. So I think we all know which multiculturally-enriching community they came from. As for why it took so long to prosecute these multiculturally-enriching men for offences committed decades ago, I assume it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a Mr Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013!
Around 1,200,000 mostly Third-World multiculturally-enriching people came to the UK last year under the fake Tories’ open-borders policies. There were around 1,000,000 the year before. Only about 150,000 troops took part in the D-Day landings. So what we are now seeing is a real invasion of our once great country. And this invasion by mostly hostile hordes has been facilitated and even encouraged by our treacherous, WEF-adoring, UK-hating political, media, business and academic elites. In my ignorant opinion, this was not the kind of future for Britain for which so many young men gave their lives in the last two world wars.
As for defending British freedom – is this the kind of freedom so many young men fought and died to protect?
Lies, damned lies and statistics
Now on to the subject of today’s blog
As I’m sure you know, an unholy row has broken out between the fake Conservatives and the tax-them-till-they bleed Labour over Sunak’s claim that Labour’s policies will increase tax on every household by over £2,000. Labour have accused Sunak of being a liar. Of course he’s a liar. He’s a politician. Moreover, he’s a politician trying to gloss over 14 years of his own party’s incompetence, stupidity, treachery and failure. So you’ve got to be a pretty brazen liar to try to get away with that.
But what I find mildly amusing is that the biggest lies in the election campaign so far have actually come from Labour. Those lies concern Labour’s claim that their wonderful new GB Energy will lower our energy bills by squandering tens of billions our money on expensive, unreliable and intermittent solar and wind power.
As I have shown in a previous blog and in an article I wrote for The Daily Sceptic on 31 May 2024, wind and solar power are much more expensive than power from cheap, reliable fossil fuels. Wholesale electricity prices are currently £65 per megawatt (MW) – about half from fossil fuels and the rest from renewables including wind, solar, hydro and nuclear. But we are paying £102/MW for fixed offshore wind, offering £246/MW to operators for floating offshore wind, £89/MW for onshore wind, and £85/MW for solar.
The amusing aspect of this is that the fake, lying Tories are so committed to the economically-suicidal Net Zero that they don’t dare expose Starmer’s GB Energy lies as that would get people asking the Tories why they were imposing Net Zero when they knew it would massively increase energy bills. The fake, lying, worthless, hopefully soon-to-be-extinct Tories seem to have been hoisted by a massive Greta-shaped petard of their own making.
What fun this hopeless, boring election campaign between two lying, UK-hating, WEF-controlled political midgets is turning out to be.
Every few days I check Amazon to see if I’ve somehow managed to sell another couple of copies of my books. When I go to the Amazon page featuring one of my books, there are always recommendations from Amazon for other books which Amazon’s AI computer thinks will be of interest to me. Today when I checked on a book I wrote in 2015 – THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL – Amazon recommended a book titled FREEDOM: The Case For Open Borders:
Here’s the blurb for this book:
“We all deserve to be free. Once upon a time, we were free to go wherever we chose. It wasn’t so long ago. The history of humanity, is a tale of constant motion.”
“People are supposed to move about. We have imaginations which encourage us to dream about life in other places, bodies which are built to roam, and hands which can make an array of vehicles. A few of us even possess the “Wanderlust Gene”, which encourages us to take risks – to sail across unchartered oceans, and launch ourselves towards faraway planets.”
“Some of us are forced to relocate. Lots of us choose to migrate. A few of us belong to nomadic communities.”
“But if one thing is clear, it’s that mobility improves our societies. Emigrants send back billions in remittances – helping to reduce poverty, and inspiring their peers to upskill. Immigrants do the work that their hosts are unwilling or unable to perform. They sustain economies which have ageing populations. They establish industries, invent products, create jobs, increase wages, fuel growth, pay taxes, and enrich our cultures – enhancing our music, arts, sports, languages and cuisine.”
“It’s time to celebrate movement! It’s time to demand our freedom! It’s time for open borders! This book explains why – making the historical, scientific, economic, cultural, political and philosophical cases for free movement.”
The author describes himself as “a scruffy nomad, unchained free-thinker, and post-modernist radical. He was raised in one of the anonymous suburbs that wrap themselves around London’s beating heart. Then he escaped! With a degree from the London School of Economics to his name, Sheldon had spells selling falafel at music festivals, being a ski-bum, and failing to turn the English Midlands into a haven of rugby league.
Then, in 2013, he stumbled upon McLeod Ganj; an Indian village which is home to thousands of angry monkeys. It was there that Sheldon wrote his debut novel, ‘Involution & Evolution’. Eleven years down the line, he’s penned eight titles in total, including two works of non-fiction: “DEMOCRACY: A User’s Guide”, and his latest release, “FREEDOM: The Case For Open Borders”.
While the author drools over all the wonderful supposed ‘benefits’ of uncontrolled immigration, he fails (IMHO) to mention some possible downsides:
destruction of our culture
breakdown in social cohesion
bankrupting our social security systems, healthcare and schools
massive increase in violence and crime, especially crime against women
invasion by a hostile army
Why do I bother mentioning this (IMHO) pile of utter nonsense by someone who (IMHO) is a complete idiot? Because there are probably millions of our own citizens who have been brainwashed at schools and universities to loathe their own countries and to believe that we’re all part of one happy family so anyone coming from any Third-World, self-inflicted hell-hole is a wonderful human being who has greater rights to the benefits of our country than our own citizens:
This invasion will only get worse under the ghastly Keir ‘Blair mini-me’ Starmer and flame-haired lefty temptress Angie ‘several homes’ Rayner.
Here’s a rather unpleasant photo from Sudan where Arab/Muslim militias are slaughtering every black African they can find:
I believe over 220 black Africans were slaughtered by the Muslim Arabs in just one incident.
I wonder if the BBC or any UK Hamas-adoring mainstream media will think this genocide worth mentioning? I wonder if the Hamas-lovers will be protesting about this real genocide?
Hopefully many readers are realising what a disaster the mass vaccination with fake and ineffective Covid-19 supposed vaccines was. It is probable that the vaccines did reduce the number of hospitalisations among the frail and elderly during the first phase of the Covid pandemic. But it is becoming clear that natural immunity and cheap off-patent drugs like Ivermectin were more effective than the fake vaccines in the later stages of the pandemic. Yet our doctors and the medical and political establishment kept forcing the fake vaccines on us.
I suspect that most of the doctors and other vaccine fanboys and fangirls didn’t understand:
what the vaccines’ supposed 97% effectiveness actually measured
the difference between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ risk (which I have exlained in a previous blog)
that the vaccines were never even tested against preventing spread of the virus
the vaccines should only have been given to a small minority of the population
that later mutations of the virus were much less pathogenic than the original strain so there was probably absolutely no need for vaccine booster shots
But here’s a YouTube video from Paul Weston in which he exposes how the vaccine fanatics we saw on our TVs and the medical authorities pushing the vaccines were mostly getting generous payments from the vaccine manufacturers. For me particularly repulsive was a Dr Sarah Jarvis who (as far as I understood) was pushing for children to be vaccinated to supposedly stop the spread of the virus when the vaccines had never been tested to see whether they prevented the spread of the virus. I’ll let you judge whether her recommendation was the result of ignorance, cynicism or genuine belief in the safety and effectiveness of the ‘safe’ and ‘effective’ miracle vaccines:
Ideally you should read my previous (Wednesday-Thursday) blog to get the context for today’s piece. In my Wednesday-Thursday blog I tried to explain how pharma companies, aided and abetted by (IMHO) useless poodle supposed ‘science journalists’ used the concept of ‘relative risk’ to convince us of the effectiveness of new drugs and the concept of ‘absolute risk’ to downplay side effects.
I haven’t yet found the original study results which prompted Ozempic maker, Novo Nordisk, and virtually every mainstream media to claim that Ozempic reduced the risk of heart attacks and strokes by 20%. But I have found a few figures which cast a bit of light on this 20% claim.
The study was sponsored by Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic and Wegovy and titled: Semaglutide Effects on Heart Disease and Stroke in Patients With Overweight or Obesity.
Half the 17,000+ participants were given a semaglutide medicine and half a placebo. The participants had to use an injection pen to inject the study medicine in a skinfold once a week for up to five years and undergo up to 25 medical examinations including blood tests. I don’t know about you, but if I was invited to take part in testing a new supposed medicine which required me to inject myself once a week for between 2.5 and 5 years and give loads of blood to be tested so that a Big Pharma company could make billions for itself, I’d politely tell the company where they could put their injections. So I wonder what kind of people would participate. I suspect that the nature of the study would put off a lot of people and thus bias the kind of people who did agree to participate to those who already had serious weight and thus health problems.
A primary cardiovascular end-point event (heart attack or stroke) occurred in 569 of the 8,803 patients (6.5%) in the semaglutide group and in 701 of the 8,801 patients (8.0%) in the placebo group. That gives you the 20% reduced risk of a heart attack or stroke. This 20% reduction is what’s called the ‘relative risk’. That sounds amazing and you’d think ‘wow, Novo Nordisk’s wonder drug will cut the number of heart attacks and strokes by 20%!’
But we could also look at what’s called the ‘absolute risk’. If there were 132 (701-569) fewer heart attacks or strokes in the semaglutide group than in the placebo group on a participant population of 8,803 getting the active drug – that’s an ‘absolute risk’ reduction of less than about 1.5% if I’ve got my figures right. So, taking the Novo Nordisk ‘miracle drug’ results in between one and two fewer heart attacks and/or strokes per hundred obese people at risk. And given the unpleasant nature of the study – weekly self-injections plus up to 25 medical controls including blood tests – I imagine the participants would be those who are more seriously ill in the first place. So, for every hundred obese people given the Novo Nordisk ‘wonder drug’, there would be about one less heart attack and/or stroke. That sounds rather less impressive than “a 20% reduction in heart attacks and strokes” claimed by Novo Nordisk and its tame, scientifically-challenged journalists.
Dr Google tells us that as of May 2024, gastrointestinal disorders were the most common Ozempic side effects reported to the FDA. Nausea was the most common side effect reported, followed by constipation second and diarrhea third. Rarer but more serious side effects include stomach paralysis, gallbladder issues, gallstones, pancreatitis and thyroid cancer. I haven’t seen the figures for the frequency of these side effects. But if we look at the results of the Novo Nordisk study we find that the dropout rate was 8.2% for those receiving the placebo compared to16.6% of those given the active drug. So about 720 participants in the placebo group gave up compared to around 1,460 in the treatment group. We can assume that the side effects were so bad that about 740 participants (1,460-720) couldn’t continue. So the incidence of severe side effects (740) far outweighed the number of heart attacks or strokes (132) the semaglutide allegedly prevented. This doesn’t, of course, mean that the semaglutides don’t reduce the risk of a heart attack or stroke by about one person per hundred taking a semaglutide like Ozempic or Wegovy. But it is unfortunate that when breathlessly hyperventilating about the supposed benefits of these drugs, most ‘science journalists’ seem to have forgotten to mention the rather unpleasant side effects.
A cynic might even be tempted to suspect that many ‘science journalists’ are merely propagandists for the Big Pharma industry.
You’ll all have no doubt heard and read possibly statistically-challenged journalists excitedly hyperventilating about the new “miracle drugs” – Ozempic and Wegovy. At first they were targetted at the very lucrative weight loss market. But now a new study tells us they can also reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes:
“Weight loss jab could reduce heart attack risk by 20%” said the BBC
“Weight loss drug could reduce heart attack risk by 20%” said the BBC’s in-house journal – The Guardian
“Obesity drug cuts risk of heart attack or stroke regardless of weight lost” said Sky News
“Weight loss drug also protects against heart disease” wrote Scientific American
and lots of other mainstream media contained the same story
But there are some curious aspects to this story: firstly because this impressively-positive study was sponsored by Novo Nordisk – the manufacturer of the two drugs. Moreover, the latest version of the study was completed a couple of months ago. The fact that it is now being so widely reported suggests that what we’re getting may be a well-funded PR campaign run by Novo Nordisk rather than hard-working, investigative journalists coming to conclusions based on actually looking at the detailed study results. Some cynics have even suggested that the ‘miracle, breakthrough drugs’ campaign has been launched to try to distract us from stories about the negative and sometimes dangerous side effects of these two drugs.
But perhaps the key issue is: what is actually being measured by the reported “20%” reduction in heart attacks and strokes in the drugs manufacturer’s self-promoting study.
There are two main ways a pharma company can express results of their clinical trials – ‘relative risk’ and ‘absolute risk’. Let me use a simple example to explain.
Let’s imagine a five-year study done on a new statin in a medium-risk group of say 10,000 participants. Half the participants are given the new statin and the other half a placebo. Let’s further imagine that just 1.9% of those given the statin have heart attacks during the five years compared to 3.1% in the placebo group. The statin manufacturer could report that the risk of a heart attack in the group given the statin reduces by 120 heart attacks per 10,000 people. That’s an ‘absolute risk’ reduction of around one person per 100 people – 1.2% – (310 – 190) /10,000. But given typical side-effects of statins – headache; dizziness; feeling sick; feeling unusually tired or physically weak; digestive system problems, such as constipation, diarrhoea and indigestion; muscle pain; sleep problems; low blood platelet count and more serious issues such as liver damage, diabetes and memory impairment – many doctors would not be too enthusiastic about prescribing this new statin and many people wouldn’t be too excited about taking it for the rest of their lives if it just reduced the risk of a heart attack by one person per 100.
However, there’s another way for the pharma company to report their study results – this is the ‘relative risk’. In this case, the ‘relative risk’ of having a heart attack for those not taking this ‘wonderful new groundbreaking’ statin would be around 63% higher (3.1 ÷ 1.9) than those taking the statin. So using the ‘relative risk’, the pharma company could report that their statin almost halves (I hope I’ve got that right) the risk of a heart attack. Now that’s a more impressive claim to encourage doctors to prescribe and patients to take this new statin.
However, when reporting side effects from their products, pharma companies tend to use ‘absolute risk’. For example, a study of around 467,000 people on various medical databases was conducted to assess whether there was an increased risk of people on statins developing acute pancreatitis. In the non-statin group (233,425), there were 1,355 cases of acute pancreatitis and in the statin group (233,647) there were 1,807 cases. If the pharma company was to use ‘relative risk’, they’d have to admit that there was a 33% increased risk of developing acute pancreatitis from taking statins. That’s not likely to encourage either doctors or patients. However, using ‘absolute risk’ the pharma company could say that the increased risk of acute pancreatitis from statin use was a mere 1 case per 1,000 people. That’s obviously a much more positive message than using the ‘relative risk’ of saying there was a 33% increased risk of acute pancreatitis.
I admit I haven’t looked through the detail of the new Novo Nordisk study suggesting that their products, Ozempic and Wegovy, are new wonder drugs which, in addition to being effective against obesity, can also reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes by 20%. But I strongly suspect that Novo Nordisk have used the ‘relative vs absolute risk’ trick when reporting their study results. I imagine that Novo Nordisk have used ‘relative risk’ for reporting the amazing benefits of their products – a 20% reduction in heart attacks and strokes – and ‘absolute risk’ when downplaying the likely side effects. I look forward to someone much more intelligent than myself investigating this to find out what is really going on.
David Craig, on June 14th, 2024
