14 Comments
Apr 21Liked by Melanie Newfield

Another source of free articles is from public libraries. A recent search on 'climate change' returned over 300000 articles. All are full text, peer reviewed journals, reviews and reports. Of course you can narrow down the returns using keywords from your topic. You can also search by journal name. You just need to join a library where you live, and get a library card number.

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Thanks, I'll have to check that out, once I can get back into my account. Could be really useful.

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So ad hominem is a legitimate academic excercise these days?

The first thing that you should look for is ‘is the evidence stacking up for this’.

Who’s taking your climate disinformation course by the way? Someone from the Arts maybe?

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I’ll be blunt. Covid was a complete fraud. So a lot of people are asking questions about the climate narrative. Since about 2019 I’ve found that the left is completely compromised on this narrative and that many of them don’t know a thing about it. When I ran for Mayor here in Dunedin in 2022 there was another candidate called Pauline who was what would be termed a ‘climate denier’ and she was bailed up outside Opoho one night during the campaigning by a couple of lefty guys who were haranguing her about the topic. I don’t agree with Pauline but joining in this conversation well it was very noticeable that Pauline knew much more about the topic than they did as they practically knew nothing.

Lefties I’ve decided (and I’m still one really) are not in the climate change jurisdiction for the evidence, they’re there because it’s a political position for the left. So they can’t stomach being wrong about anything about it as normally they’re know nothings. The trouble for me is that all the Corporates until recently have been fully onboard with it along with Klaus Schwab and his WEF. These are not the good guys (and definitely not on the left) and if they’re pushing for various dystopian positions including reducing the world’s population to 200 or 500 million (95% of you to die) then sorry, you have to push back if your opposition are not scientists but rather eugenicists.

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There's a difference between questioning someone's argument because they are female, or a particular weight or a particular race or have a particular appearance, and questioning whether they have either the qualifications or experience to claim authority in a field. I'm not someone who argues that a PhD is necessary - that was obvious to me early in my career when my mentor was far less qualified than I was. But I also don't think that people acquire the ability to understand a complex scientific topic without putting in the hard yards.

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A PhD just means someone has written on something very specialized for 2-5 years or more (unless your name is Wiles or Drosten as then even that bit is arguably absent).

I’m not sure how race or sex came into this one, I certainly didn’t mention it.

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And Covid showed how a lot of people were prepared to go along with the fraud without putting in the hard yards and nevetheless being quite prepared to say to those of us who had put in the hard yards that we were unscientific just because we said that all the evidence pointed to a fraud. It was part of the process of ‘science’ becoming ‘religion’. Siouxsie Wiles never mentioned one bit of evidence ever. But she got together with a cartoonist to present ‘facts' to the New Zealand public. It was a joke, a bad one.

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One other bit of evidence is all the grants that have gone Michael Baker’s way. Theres literally 10 million or more of them. He’s like Fauci who has received north of 30m in grants to investigate AIDs and now Covid. There’s a financial incentive in bad acting viruses for both of them (who are bad actors themselves).

As for climate change you have malicious actors on both sides. On one side is the Oil and Gas industry and on the other side is the WEF. The absurd thing is that the WEF is made up of so many of the world’s large corporates that you find the likes of Shell on both sides of the maliciousness here. Really good luck getting truth from those stones.

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Thanks Melanie for all the work that you do and you sharing all the links on how to investigate misinformation and disinformation. Years ago I used to be a social studies teacher. Social values exploration is a strand of social studies and we would spend a lot of time distinguishing between facts and opinions, particularly my own words if I did on occasion share my opinion with the class rather than simply facts. It used to said that history was written by the victors. Nowadays, it seems that anyone can write anything and we have such things as rabbit holes to fall down on the internet. Your work in this area is absolutely vital and ought to be incorporated in schools. I have been a candidate in the New Zealand elections for a political party in 2023 and 2011. One of the biggest problems was lack of information by the voters and a disbelief of the facts.

Lastly, I had to chuckle at the irony at one of your commenters concerned about the quality of the evidence of your sources or research, when your entire article is precisely on this point!!

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Thanks, I appreciate it.

The internet has certainly changed the information landscape. However I do think that there have always been people making claims on evidence I'd consider questionable. When the smallpox vaccine became available, there were cartoons published in newspapers suggesting that it would turn people would turn into cows.

I do hope that lateral reading gets taught in schools and becomes a life skill that everyone thinks is useful.

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Apr 24Liked by Melanie Newfield

Nice summary on ways to get access to articles. Even within research institutions, the access we have is incredibly heterogeneous.

I'd just like to add that the number of publications someone has is not a particularly useful indicator of doing "good" science - it says more about their funding and perhaps job stability and institutional functioning, than anything else these days.

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That's a really good point, thank you. There's a clear difference between someone like me and someone who is working as a research scientist, but we still need to be cautious in how we interpret those kinds of numbers.

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The problem with researchgate is they’ve taken down a lot of the free versions we posted as the publishers started threatening legal action. I still post all mine on my website hoping I won’t get found out. Most of the time this kind of archiving is ok but not all.

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Thanks, Melanie, for your calm, measured writing and views. I suppose another warning sign for me brazen black and white statements. I'm always skeptical when folks claim there's one and only one right answer...

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