Today we start a series looking at the new bestselling book Canary in a Climate World: Climate Realism vs. the Net Zero Myth. From the title you can guess the slant, but you may not expect the sheer number (38) of well-credentialed contributors. And we begin where they did, with the first chapter called “A Personal Awakening: from Covid to Climate” by Dr. Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at University of London. What’s an expert in cancer research doing writing about climate? Well, he doesn’t claim to be a climate scientist in the narrow sense (though he certainly understands statistics). Instead he writes about how his experience as a medical expert during Covid opened his eyes to the way science can be politicized and hijacked to serve an agenda. Once he saw the same pattern in climate, he realized it was essentially the same story, with many of the same characters, just being played out on a much slower time scale.
Dalgleish is a man who understands how science is done, or should be. He’s an expert in cancer immunotherapy and virology, who has made award-winning contributions to the fight against HIV, among other diseases. When Covid broke out he found himself at the forefront of research on the unfolding pandemic. But soon his suspicions were aroused.
“I was surrounded by experts and doctors who believed every word they were being told. What first shook me was work done with my close collaborator Birger Sorensen, with whom I had been helping to improve an already effective HIV therapeutic vaccine, Vacc-4X. Sorensen spotted that the sequence of SARS CoV-2 published in Nature in February 2020 contained several highly positively charged inserts that one simply did not see in natural viruses.”
So, a scientific discovery to be shared, right? Dalgleish explains why the six sequences in question could not be natural, and moreover two of them matched ones published earlier by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But when he pointed this non-coincidence out to colleagues he was told, basically, to shut up. In a revealing echo of the “not a climate scientist” trope, people with far less training than him told him he wasn’t an expert and wasn’t qualified to comment on the matter. And in another revealing echo, when he took his findings to the government he was accused of spreading misinformation for saying something true.
It gets worse. He then watched the official response to Covid break all the rules. China could have stopped the spread within days by preventing people from leaving Wuhan, but instead they and the WHO allowed daily flights to leave the city, sending the pandemic around the world. The data began to show that only the elderly or people with comorbidities were at risk of death, yet governments around the world imposed universal lockdowns, urged on them by incompetent and narrow-minded scientists whose computer models consistently overpredicted infection rates, painting an alarmist picture of catastrophe that went unchallenged.
Dalgleish was also dismayed to see that standard symptomatic treatments, such as vitamin D3 and inhaled steroids, that he was using successfully on his patients, were being cast aside by the General Medical Council in favour of dangerous alternatives including ventilators which, he says, “in many cases certainly killed rather than saved lives by pushing secretions back into the lungs and effectively drowning the patients.” He accused the GMC of:
“prosecuting good doctors for looking after their patients and not slavishly following official guidelines, which often had more in common with what I can only describe as highly coercive and authoritarian behaviour.”
Then the vaccines arrived. Dalgleish and his colleagues reviewed all the available literature and concluded that no coronavirus vaccine had ever succeeded. Instead the vaccines were likely to program the immune system against obsolete variants and impair its ability to recognise the current one. The demand that everybody everywhere take the shot, despite the knowledge that it was a futile treatment and posed serious risks to people who were not at risk of dying, convinced Dalgleish that what was happening was a scam or worse.
At which point he noticed the eerie similarities to climate change.
“Fear was used to bulldoze through Net Zero and the climate goals associated with the COP process. There was literally no debate in parliament. Under Theresa May, everyone simply went along with it.... We were expected to sacrifice industries on which what remained of our economy and prosperity still depended, all for ideology. And for what?”
Dalgliesh spells out the blueprint that unites Covid and climate change: suppression of information, denial of facts, disparagement of dissent, massive financial gains going to a few privileged insiders and hardship for everyone else.
Once you’ve seen the pattern you can’t unsee it. And until more people see it, we remain at risk that it will play out again and again, because it is deeply revealing of the mindset, and morals, of our supposed betters.
Next week: the awakening of a Greenpeace pioneer.
