Enjoy the Daily Sceptic while you can. A powerful network of climate change activists are working on “stamping out climate change misinformation once and for all”. And by “climate change misinformation” they don’t mean things like claiming that we have 18 months to save the planet. (See this piece by the BBC’s Environment Correspondent.) They mean anything that challenges the prevailing orthodoxy about climate change, however well-evidenced.
A reader received this email today, inviting him to attend a Censors’ Conference organised by the Institute of Government and Public Policy.
Dear XXX,
I wanted to get in touch with you this morning as we have received a small pot of funding for the Tackling Online Misinformation and Disinformation virtual conference which has allowed us to allocate X part-funded tickets to attend on January 18th. Would this be of interest to you or your colleagues?
View the event agenda and keynote speakers here.
Major U.K. brands including Virgin Media O2, Sky, British Gas, Ben & Jerry’s and SSE have signed an open letter calling on Cop26 decision-makers and technology platforms to take immediate action on stamping out climate change misinformation once and for all. Led by the Conscious Advertising Network, a voluntary coalition of organisations on a mission to prevent advertisers from inadvertently funding harmful content online, the letter says climate change has reached a “crisis point”. Recent research from Stop Funding Heat also found 113 ads on Facebook with messages like “climate change is a hoax” between January and October 2021, with an estimated spend of between £42,000 and £55,000.
This timely event will explore the emerging threat landscape of misinformation and disinformation online, and provide actionable insights into tackling this pressing issue.
Hear from Sterling Rippy, Strategic Lead Behavioural Insights, Public Health, London Borough of Hounslow as he discusses addressing vaccine misinformation by using the messenger principle and providing insight on how to best launch information campaigns.
Why attend?
* Discover effective strategies and software which can help to identify and counter disinformation online
* Discuss and debate the impact of the Online Harms Whitepaper with regards to digital disinformation
* Increasing media literacy as a defence against disinformation
* Assess the potential role of AI in the counter-disinformation framework
* Hear the ways in which Ofcom will balance upholding freedom of expression whilst providing a duty of care
* Improving the Social Media Landscape – dismantling incentivisationWe hope to see you at the event.
Sinister, or what?
Stop Press: The BBC’s new Specialist Disinformation Reporter Marianna Springs has written an article for BBC News headlined: “Covid denial to climate denial: How conspiracists are shifting focus.” Here is an extract:
According to researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that researches global disinformation trends, some anti-lockdown groups have become polluted by misleading posts about climate change being overplayed, or even a so-called “hoax” designed to control people.
“Increasingly, terminology around COVID-19 measures is being used to stoke fear and mobilise against climate action,” says the ISD’s Jennie King.
She says this isn’t really about climate as a policy issue.
“It’s the fact that these are really neat vectors to get themes like power, personal freedom, agency, citizen against state, loss of traditional lifestyles – to get all of those ideas to a much broader audience.”
When I saw Marianna citing the Institute for Strategic Dialogue as an authoritative source it rang a bell. I did a bit of digging and, sure enough, this very same organisation warned last year (“COVID-19 Disinformation Briefing No. 2“) that the far-Right online community had “mobilised” to “advance a range of… conspiracy theories relating to COVID-19”, one of which was… you guessed it… the claim that the virus was developed in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Here’s what the ISD said about that particularly “conspiracy theory”:
This theory is part of a wider right-wing conspiracy which some QAnon supporters have adopted. It claims that COVID-19 didn’t emerge from a food market in Wuhan but was rather engineered in a nearby laboratory and then released, either deliberately or accidentally. The main piece of evidence to support this claim is that China’s only Biosafety Level 4 lab (the maximum safety level used to deal with highly dangerous pathogens) is also located in Wuhan, and conservative media has repeatedly highlighted the connection, despite experts saying that there is absolutely no scientific evidence that the genome is man-made.
Absolutely no scientific evidence. Read Douglas Murray’s pouring scorn on this report in UnHerd.
Maybe the ISD would like to leaf through the new book by Matt Ridley and Alina Chen called Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Plenty of scientific evidence to support that hypothesis in there.
I’ve got a suggestion, Marianna. If you’re really interested in shadowy organisations spreading disinformation about COVID-19, why don’t you take a closer look at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue?
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It’s not in line for it. It’s already being censored.
What annoys me most is that these people think they have the monopoly on science, when they mostly haven’t an idea how science works
Look it’s settled.
Or we send round the Scinquisitiion and prevent your heretic grants until you repent denier!
I’m probably one of the few on here who doesn’t agree with the site’s view on climate change (although I do agree with their condemnation of the hypocrisy seen at Glasgow recently).
However, I absolutely do not agree with censoring views which I don’t happen to agree with. Let both sides put their case, and if anything claimed (by either side) is demonstrably factually wrong, it should be pointed out.
Censoring views which don’t fit with the prevailing orthodoxy is the behaviour of dictatorships, not of democracies.
What is your position on climate change? I accept that increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in modest warming but that is not something that we can’t easily adapt to.
The period between 1300-1800 included frequent periods of crop failure and mass starvation due to brutal climate conditions which begs the question what is the ideal mean surface temperature for the earth.
I definitely wouldn’t call myself a ‘climate denier’, but a significant proportion of the interventions that governments have made to try to reduce global warming have had negative environmental effects. I just hope that they don’t go for the ‘geoengineering’ option that would allow them to screw things up on a massive scale
I think that’s another of Mr Gates’s speciality’s.
Yes interesting, isn’t it?
I guess 100% is significant.
Not sure why anyone thinks it would be better if it were colder, have we not learned already that cold kills far more people than heat?
Yes, If mankind is to decide the correct temperature for the planet, what temperature should that be?
Play with the thermostat until it feels comfortable. Apparently the COP26 folk think they can calibrate it to the nearest half a degree.
Probably near where we are now, actually.
My current view is that 250 years of coal burning, and recently oil and gas, probably stopped the world moving into another ice age. I recall a magazine cover from 1975 featuring ‘the next ice age’ but we’ve burned more fossil fuels since then than we burned in previous history.
However, it’s been getting a bit out of hand. Sea level rising by a metre by 2100 would be excessive. It’s already a little too exciting if you live in a cottage near the Norfolk coast.
Luckily I live on the English/Welsh border at 100 metres above sea level. Others are not so lucky.
Tidal gauges have average increase of 2mm/yr; satellites have 3mm/yr.
No sign of incease of trend. I will let you do the math. England is of course very gradually rising in the west and falling in the east. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with atmospheric CO2.
That explains the sinking feeling I get whenever I visit my old home in Fakenham.
I thought it was glacial rebound on the British Isles?
i.e. as the weight of a 1000′ thick lump of ice was removed from the northern 1/2, that is slowly pivoting up & the south down.
Well, the flat, sandy North Norfolk beach where I used to swim and play in the 1950s is now salt marsh as the land is building around the vegetation that now covers it. The only homes that I am aware of that are in danger are on cliff tops where the cliffs are being eroded much as they have been for centuries.
This coastal erosion is caused by the actions of waves, the nature of the soil, the narrow beaches and, ironically, man’s misguided attempts to control erosion.
Oh noes! only 80 years to figure out what to do!
The mean surface temperature of the earth is a mathematical fiction with no real-world relevance whatsoever. It’s also – by design – heavily influenced by outliers: A single temperature reading of 40 degrees contributes as much to it as 4 temperature readings of 10 degrees or 8 temperature readings of 5 degrees. One could call this designed to overrepresent extremity. This would obviously work for extremely low temperatures as well but I strongly suspect there are less measurement stations in Antartica than in Australia.
Excactly, there can be a couple of degrees temperature difference in the 20 miles between the m25 and central london and yet we’re supposed to believe they’ve calculated a precise average temperature for the world to 2 decimal places based on thermometers that can be hundreds of miles apart.
We’re also supposed to believe that nature can’t cope with a 1.5C average increase (whatever that is) over a century when I’ve seen over 40C difference over a single year here in London.
A sunny day in January: max. 10 C, min. minus 5 C = avge temp. of 2.5 C
A cloudy day in January: max. 7 C min. 2 C = avge temp. of 4.5 C
That’s a rise in average temperature of 2 C. OMG ban everything we’re all going to die.
Indeed.
The calculation is easy enough. The problem is that it makes no sense. I’ll try to explain why although my knowledge about the theory behind this is a bit thin:
Assuming the amount of a certain quantifable property is to be determined by measurements, then, each individual measurement will invariably contain a signal part which is the sought-for amount and an error part: An individual measurement will be too large or too small by an unknown amount. If these errors are randomly distributed, ie, all values, both positive and negative ones, are equally probably, one can therefore seek to minimize the error in the final result by taking a number of measurements, adding the values together, and dividing the sum by the number of measurements. Tendencially, the randomly distributed error parts of the individual measurements will cancel each other out when adding enough values as there will be as many positive as negative errors with the same distribution of absolute error values.
Problem A: We don’t know if the errors are randomly distributed and have no way of determining that. If we could, error wouldn’t be a problem to begin with.
Problem B: A number of temperature measurements from all other the globe are not measurements of the same quantifiable property differing only in randomly distributed errors. They measurements of different properties and averageing them together thus just results in a meaningless, fictional value.
It’s akin to wandering through a park while breaking of branches from trees at random, measuring the lengths of all these branches and averaging that: The result means nothing for any indvidual branch, regardless if it was among the broken off ones or not.
Surely nobody in their right mind could deny climate change? The only thing I deny is that it has anything to do with mankind.
Climate warriors like Johnson will do more to damage humanity in 12 months than climate change will do in 12 centuries.
They are the real terrorists.
All that most of the climate change cynics like me want is a chance to debate the science, however the opportunity is always denied by those who claim that the science is settled.
If it is settled then obviously no further scientific advancement is possible so we might as well cut all the funding now.
As with Covid, I take a ‘peel the onion’ approach to climate change.
Outer layer – ok, assuming that the science is correct and climate change is bad business, will the solutions offered by government a) work in theory, b) work in practice, c) not carry immense collateral damage. The answers to these are a) maybe, b) probably not, c) no, collateral damage will be ABSOLUTELY HUGE.
We need to increase the use of fossil fuels to lift the third world out of poverty. Not only is that a good by itself, reducing poverty makes people better more flexible when dealing with problems, including adapting to climate change (e.g. they can afford to modify their house to deal with changed weather patterns better). At present, fossil fuels are by far the most efficient and practical form of energy. A non-poverty level of income is associated with far higher energy use than a poverty level of income. It is cheapest and best to provide this with fossil fuels.
Even if climate change is real and serious, I STILL want the governments of the world to do nothing about it.
Core layer – is the science really that firm? I think the answer here is that what we are told by our politicians and ‘activists’ that the science is saying, it isn’t really. The consensus view is not that ‘we are all going to die’ but more along the lines that we are going to face some challenges spread out over the next 100 years.
To be honest, I’m probably a denier as, even though I don’t have a science background, I feel very little reason to trust the scientists. Maybe one day that means I’ll be hit by that meteorite I was told to avoid. Whatever; sod em.
Again, as with Covid, their arguments fail at almost every level. I hope that with Covid the contradictions will eventually cause it to all fall apart. Unfortunately with climate change it is more amorphous – although if Boris pushes it far enough for people to become aware of the economic pain then maybe they’ll start questioning the narrative.
Well argued.
If you think that the “site’s view on climate change” is generally sceptical and you don’t agree with censorship I would suggest you view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzpPXuASY8
This will provide you with the facts to support any scepticism on the ‘climate chgange crisis’ and an interrsting insight into the censorship undertaken by the supporters of said ‘crisis’
Do you agree that categorizing fantasy beliefs in the supernatural as a legitimate alternative to peer reviewed scientific research and consensus is irrational ?
This site for example is very much the online equivalent of a cute little witchcraft shop in Brighton. Mutual support for the deranged is all very well and good unless they are in charge and start burning the unbelievers.
It should be noted that Stamping out misinformation inherently requires that nothing must be published before a political commission appointed for this purpose has authorized it as genuine information. Which is the definition of censorship, regardless of the intent behind it. Censorship is, in fact, always about restricting access to information some people regard as detrimental to something the view as greater good.
For the greater good the world’s population is being massively reduced. Manmade climate change and Covid-19 are the two biggest conspiracies of our time and are inextricably linked together.
Sterling Rippy. That is not a real name. Come on.
They’re just making sh*t up now.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-59255165
‘Specialist Disinformation Reporter’. How bloody Orwellian is that?
To be fair to Marriana, she is bloody good at producing specialist disinformation.
I have ticked although to be honest I don’t watch, listen or read anything from the BBC.
If anything technology is enabling people to communicate more effectively. Its easy to bypass the mainstream sites. I’m not concerned at all
Perhaps, but that’s not the point. The point is that once dissent is criminalised the full force of the police and security apparatus can easily be deployed against dissenters. The process is the punishment, in large part, and the main aim is intimidation. Not many can operate at the kind of level of tech security required to evade that kind of scrutiny. And, of course, it renders mass outreach almost impossible.
The powers that be don’t care much about a few fringe dissidents speaking only to each other. They don’t actually care much about what you say, so long as you can say it only where nobody can hear it.
Dont take this wrong, but the problem with this site is that everything is viewed to the extreme. Its doom mongering just the same as what the covid/climate zealots do.
Not going to say there’s no truth in what you say, but imo there’s a difference between made up panics based on modelling misrepresentations, and warnings of the potential societal consequences of increasing state and elite power.
In particular, we know we already have a problem with intolerance and censorship of dissent (that’s what enabled a lot of the covid panic nonsense to be sustained). We know that people have already been hounded for expressing conservative or traditionalist opinions even under the existing laws. Is it really unreasonable to point to the likely consequences of something like this Online Harms nonsense?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xmc41xVTCM
O’KEEFE AND HANNITY ON FBI RAIDS: “Process is the punishment”
A good recent example.
This is a vicious war. Our enemies are very powerful and very wicked.
They’ve always been powerful and wicked, so what?
>I’ve got a suggestion, Marianna. If you’re really interested in shadowy organisations spreading disinformation about COVID-19, why don’t you take a closer look at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue?
Look it’s always Projection and always will be Projection with these types
“Discuss and debate the impact of the Online Harms Whitepaper with regards to digital disinformation”
All the worst forces in our society must be absolutely salivating at the prospect of this forthcoming censor’s charter.
Can bodies like the Free Speech Union and Big Brother Watch survive without going through the process of elite capture that rendered the likes of Liberty part of the problem rather than anything good?
And at the least, we must try to push for the defunding of the BBC while we still have a nominally conservative government. (They aren’t actually meaningfully conservative, obviously, but they do need to occasionally pretend to be so in order to keep the votes they gain under false pretences, so they can be vulnerable to pressure now and then.
#defundthebbc
We may start hearing a lot more of the “18 months to save the planet” line. It’s being spouted by the deranged crown prince. “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.” (Emphasis added.)
Cull time.
Nothing like putting a number on something.
(And look what number they’ve chosen.)
Edit: I see “Prince” Charles came out with the “18 months” line 28 months ago!
Off topic, but is it time to join ‘Republic’ yet?
The only thing worse than that waste of space prince charles would be a president. Can you imagine president Blair or Boris?
I suspect we already have that.
I suppose we do, in all but name
He is an extremely dangerous Nutjob.
Charles also said we had 5 years to save the planet in 2011, which means it should have gone by 2016.
You can point these articles out to the loons and they still won’t accept it for what it is.
“Stop Funding Heat”.
*Facepalm*
I didn’t realize the incredible stupidity of that. If people behind this live in so-called temperate latitudes, they could start by not heating their homes in winter and remaining naked throughout all of the year.
“The messenger principle” is a recent term that adds no insight whatsoever to the understanding of an age-old approach to propaganda: if you want to spread a message, let people hear it from gobs that they trust.
What do trees ‘breathe’?
FBI Whistleblower Reveals Biden DOJ Activated Counterterrorism Division Against Protesting Parents This is where it’s going, you’re labelled a terrorist if you don’t conform to the liberal establishment.
Remember those Draconian anti terrorism laws, the secret courtrooms, snoopers charter, laws giving government departments impunity to break the law!
Those people that said if you’ve got nothing to hide, well trust goes both ways & the system doesn’t trust you or me.
I’m seriously done with being alive now! Don’t worry, not going to kill myself or anything but I now have no fear of death and I’m no longer bothered as to how long I’ll have left. I don’t want to be living in this kind of world anymore.
Snap, & I was thinking that way pre-covid, but the more they push, the more I want to fight back just for the sake of not surrendering to the fukkers.
Say it all before they stop us, but no words describe how bad SSE and ‘Ombudsmen’ are.
Greta kid and sit-down protesters have made many msm followers anti-‘climate’.
Death been familiar ever since I was a young child. It’s the unknown we tend to fear, not the familiar.
As death is an automatic fact of life, making best of every moment of life we happen to get is only option. Pre-2020 was Life.
Since then mere existence – living death must be resisted for life on Earth to survive. ‘Bad’ news gives us more info about how to successfully resist.
As Humans cannot see into the future, unexpected is guaranteed – anything’s possible, best laid plans can go wrong.
We don’t fail unless we give up and why give up when unexpected success can happen?
Some seem sinking into ‘doom and gloom’. If we go there, we’ll give up.
Recent articles elsewhere describe rough time sceptics are in for. Some may ultimately opt for easier; others not – hope of light at end of tunnel and ‘easy’ is a bit of a wash-out, it’s ‘difficult’ that’s great fun is it not
I feel like that too.
In a typical 2 floor house there is 8-10deg temp difference between the upper and lower floors. Its clearly the end of civilisation as we know it!
not if you live with a woman there isn’t, both floors are tropical
It’s true, women are disproportionately responsible for heating and therefore C02 emissions but in a weird world where we can’t smash anyone other than a white male, that cannot be a reason!
What are these people afraid of that they have to shut down debate. They must worry about their gravy train being derailed.
The truth. Because it doesn’t fit with their dogma.
And the truth instantly strips them of their ‘power’ over us, revealing just their rotten husks pretending to be human.
The best bit is that climate change hysteria is mainly a thing of MSM; scientific evidence is actually scarce and hard to interpret as some brave scientists admit (I read at least two interesting books on that recently: Unsettled by S. Koonin and Hot Talk, Cold Science, by Singer). I thoroughly recommend for anyone interested, or worried.
Climate change is an even bigger con than Covid but they’ve rallied the troops and got the media and government onside, although oddly enough not the major “offenders” (to plant growth and greenification) like China
The only way to overturn this is to stand up to all this rubbish, be it Climate, Covid, Diversity, BLM or whatever. Attack people and do it violently but fairly, for if you stay silent out of embarrassment, then they think they’re winning and that you agree with them. Do not nod and accept, challenge and do it hard.
Sooner or later, and it looks like it will be much later, every last man and woman in Britain will have to accept their country is run by a totalitarian communist regime that demands full censorship of all counter-party narratives. This is not hyperbole. Just look at the evidence.
When I was at university, we were asked to read “the limits to growth” by the club of Rome together with a critique by Prof Wilfred Beckerman. The respective arguments were discussed on equal terms in subsequent seminars. If Beckerman had still been alive and writing today (he died relatively recently), he would probably be enduring similar treatment to Kathleen Stock. I am not sure when and how the Green movement became so intolerant. I am personally quite keen on environmental sustainability but anyone who is slightly sceptical that the end of the word is nigh is labelled as a wicked “climate denier”. How has such infantile name calling become part of the mainstream narrative? Similar tactics have been employed against lockdown sceptics. The “scientific consensus” is driven by a handful of left leaning lobbyists and a supine media. There is more evidence and useful content in a single issue of the Daily Sceptic than in a series of lectures by Sir David King and his team of doomsayers, although media bulletins appear to be their primary mode of communication these days. The save the world brigade (or else) have penetrated every facet of public life and now we are stuck with them.
So ‘major UK brands’ are the new censors of free speech?
Guess I will just have to keep posting scientifically correct information about the causes of climate change (which have nothing to do with CO2) until its made illegal by UK law.
It is a myth that CO2 emissions are the the cause of global warming/climate change/climate emergency…this short video explains why the climate ‘science’ propaganda is wrong:
https://youtu.be/n-W76C0kkwc
Technically & going by track record the greatest environmental threat to the UK is the Environment Agency.
There has been avoidable coastal erosion, flooding, river flooding, subsidence, carriage of silts over long distances rather than using them to build up soil levels next to the dredging point etc etc.
So all that damage could be avoided by closing the Environment Agency & confiscating their pensions as compensation to those flooded out in Somerset.
The level of public knowledge, regarding climate change or global warming or whatever BS term they want to use, or lack thereof, is staggering.
Joe Public has been fed a diet of culpability regarding the temperature of this planet for over thirty years and the majority have hoovered up the BS without giving a thought to research.
Idiocy is it would appear endemic.
Let’s bang our pots and pans for our teachers; the root cause of the crap scientific and critical thinking education fed to our children over the past decades
Dear XXX
We’ve wangled some money from the government to promote their Climate Cauldron policy and we invite you to match that money to burnish your eco credentials. . .
“Sterling Rippy, Strategic Lead Behavioural Insights, Public Health, London Borough of Hounslow”
With a made up name and job title like this are we sure this is not a spoof?!
“despite experts saying that there is absolutely no scientific evidence that the genome is man-made.”
You know there is an orchestrated campaign of disinformation when a statement like this ignores the report from Baric and his Frankensteinian co conspirators detailing exactly how they assembled SARS COV2 from genetically modified bat and rat coronaviruses – described as a chimera.
What further proof is needed that The BBC are peddling outright lies which appears to show they are in breach of their Royal Charter; by making the above statement “ISD” is apparently guilty of publishing disinformation – i.e. an outright lie – doing the very thing they say they are determined to “counter”.
How odd; Goebbels would be very proud of this blatant propaganda.
Why not call these groups the Ministry of Truth and have done with it
The Daily Censor would be a more apposite name for this echo chamber of belligerent ignorance. The views on climate so ludicrously expressed here are hopelessly simplistic and entirely unsupported by scientific consensus. Dear Carl Sagan is no doubt spinning out of control somewhere at the abuse of the term sceptic on this website. Many of the prejudiced herd so richly represented here clearly went septic some time ago. Refresh your self from Sagan’s well.
Let’s see how long this link to actual research and graph of atmospheric CO2 concentrations survives on this site today, before it is cancelled like it was yesterday. Of course no-one here will read any of it, for there is no true scepticism here. Ignorance is true bliss for the hard of thinking.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Lets just put the relevant fact here again shall we, for the hard of thinking