We’re publishing an original article by freelance journalist Chris Morrison disputing the idea that anyone who challenges climate change alarmism is a conspiracy theorist. Some of them are actually quite respectable.
Just before he died the popular communicator Clive James wrote an essay entitled “Mass Death Dies Hard” in which he noted that in reporting climate science the BBC “has been behaving for several years as if its true aim were to reproduce the thought control that prevailed in the Soviet Union”. When he died, the obits mostly glossed over his apostasy, although in his lifetime the fount of eternal doom George Monbiot called him a “sucker”.
“When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean they will switch over to watch Game of Thrones where the dialogue is less ridiculous and all the threats come true,” wrote James. “The proponents of man-made climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in the end.”
The writer Melanie Phillips was the first editor of the Guardian environmental supplement and today is a trenchant supporter of debating the unproven scientific hypothesis that humans cause all or most global warming. She has called the idea of settled science a “scam”. Writing on her Substack after Justin Welby said that politicians failing to address the climate emergency would be guilty of indirect genocide, she concluded that his “grossly inappropriate comparison illustrated the way in which the climate issue has unbalanced people so they lose all sense of proportion”.
The only Apollo scientist who went to the moon, Harrison Schmitt, argues that there is “no evidence” that humans cause climate change, a reference to the fact that the hypothesis has yet to produce a single peer-reviewed, credible science paper that proves it. His scepticism is shared by Buzz Aldrin, causing the polemist (and sceptic) Mark Steyn to note: “Clearly this Buzz Aldrin kook is just some whack job who believes the moon landings were filmed in Nevada.”
Dr. Patrick Moore helped to found Greenpeace and spent 15 years with the organisation. These days he thinks Greenpeace is a “monster” having turned to extremism “to try to justify its continued existence”. In his view the atmosphere could do with more CO2 plant food since it is emerging from a period of denudation when levels fell dangerously low. In fact, the recent (mostly natural) small rises in atmospheric C02 have led to an increase in global vegetation of over 14% and helped alleviate devastating famine in many parts of the world.
Many eminent scientists, sometimes at great career cost, insist the proposition that humans cause the climate to change must be subject to debate and not treated as dogma. Former MIT physicist Professor Richard Lindzen observed that there is no data trend towards extreme temperatures and in his view “an implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct knowledge and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilisation”.
In Italy, the discoverer of nuclear antimatter Emeritus Professor Antonio Zichichi recently led 48 science professors in stating that human responsibility for climate change is “unjustifiably exaggerated and catastrophic predictions are not realistic”. In their scientific view, “Natural variation explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850.”
Climate theologians have two main lines of attack in bolstering their infallible hypothesis. One is to suggest that opposing arguments are so intellectually bereft of merit that they are similar to denying the known, and proved, fact of the Jewish Holocaust – hence the use of the word “denier”. The second is to claim that anyone disagreeing with them is signed up to a conspiracy.
Last month IpsosMori produced a report on conspiracy theories and defined them as the “belief that an event or situation is the outcome of a secret plan”. Among those conspiracy theories considered by the report was the belief that “climate change is not due to human activity”. That’s right, challenging the climate emergency hypothesis means you’re an irrational troglodyte who probably believes the earth is flat and 9/11 was a false flag operation carried out by the Israeli secret service. Sadly, it seems, the Archbishop of Canterbury is not the only one struggling to keep control of his intellectual faculties.
In fact, a convincing conspiracy argument could be made for the promoters of settled climate science. We have seen that there is no substantive proof that humans cause all or most global warming. The entire push for net zero, which offers economic and political advantages to the few, not the many, is based on guesses of enormous temperature rises in the near future from climate models that have never produced an accurate forecast in 40 years of operation. What global warming there was appears to have petered out, a process that started in the late 1990s. The latest global temperature record from the University of East Anglia and the Met Office shows no rise for 91 months. The satellite record confirms this with over seven years of flatlining. In the U.K., this year is likely to be 0.5C chillier than 2020, while the 2010s were colder than the previous decade.
To counter all these inconvenient facts, the Guardian newspaper is now mandating the use of “global heating” in place of “global warming” because… well, it sounds hotter. Elsewhere in the mainstream media, the concept of a “climate emergency” – sometimes upgraded to “climate breakdown” – is in full swing. To promote this agenda, bad weather has been rebranded “extreme weather” and every fire, flood, drought, heatwave, and so forth, is used to argue that Thermogeddon is just around the corner. The emotional babblings of a Swedish child, who is said by her mother to be able to see the demon C02 gas with her own eyes, are elevated to international prominence. At the same time, Guardian activists sign a letter saying they will not “lend their credibility” to climate change “deniers” by debating climate science.
As early as 2006 the BBC met in a secret conclave and decided that humans cause climate change and the matter was not to be challenged on the airwaves. Sadly, that is the way journalism often works at the BBC, as Clive James, a free thinker to the last, came to realise. Stories are covered according to a set agenda. Even the gender of those whose opinions are aired is governed by a strict 50:50 rule.
Writing this article gives your correspondent an idea for a conspiracy theory book. A group of disaffected Marxists and Malthusians, ex-hippies, politicians with a ‘world king’ complex, and self-identifying scientists plan to take over the world by promising to stop the climate changing. They spin the line that burning ancient plant matter to live in conditions unimaginable to previous generations is the source of all bad weather and if allowed to continue will destroy life on Earth. To back up their scare stories, they consult crystal balls – I mean climate models – that warn of an approaching planetary fireball. If the title is not already taken, I shall call it Last Minute to Midnight.
Of course it would never sell – it’s not even remotely believable.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.