There have been headlines across the mainstream media following the BBC and Met Office complaints of “unprecedented levels of trolling” during the recent brief heatwave in the U.K. Hundreds of “abusive” tweets and emails have been received, claimed the BBC, one of which urged the forecasters to “get a grip”. BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor said he had never experienced anything like it in nearly 25 years working in weather. Violently abusive and threatening messages are, of course, unacceptable, but a review of Mr. Taylor’s own twitter feed for the period around the heatwave shows no abuse, unless one counts a sarcastic comment that, “we are doomed Captain Mainwaring, we’re doomed”.
Met Office lead meteorologist Alex Deakin claimed it was “scary in some ways”. He added that he found it “frustrating and offensive” on behalf of his colleagues – some of the great minds in climate science. “Show a bit of respect,” he said. One of the tweets complained: “What a load of rubbish nanny state again having another fake emergency as you will do as your (sic) told.” The “Get a grip” man went on to say: “This will not last. It will be back to freezing soon.” Professor Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society and a former BBC meteorologist, added that no one should have to deal with this kind of abuse, “especially when the scientific evidence is so clear”.
Needless to say, this level of ‘abuse’ would barely register with anyone who dares to challenge climate groupthink. After all, we are all used to being called ‘deniers’ with its clear implication that we are morally indistinguishable from Holocaust deniers. Seemingly without irony, the Metro newspaper wrote: “Weather forecasters have faced unprecedented levels of trolling from climate change deniers over this month’s extreme heatwave.” Over at the Met Office, Professor Peter Stott has recently written a book entitled Hot Air: The Insider Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. In the course of a promotional interview in the Guardian, he referred to “denialists”, and noted there were “fewer false-balance debates on TV between deniers and scientists”. Recently, the green activist Al Gore compared “climate deniers” to the Uvalde police in Texas who waited an hour to attack the gunman who shot dead 21 students and teachers.
Any attempt to bring scientific scepticism to the debate around ‘settled’ climate orthodoxy is, of course, as the unpleasant Gore demonstrates, met with constant vulgar abuse.
This tweet recently appeared following an article in the Daily Sceptic reporting on a number of sceptical views on current climate orthodoxy. Richard Lindzen has spent a lifetime in meteorology and atmospheric science, and holds the honorary title of Emeritus Professor at MIT.
If you want to be loved in journalism, goes the old saying – buy a dog. You certainly need to be a less sensitive flower than many BBC weather correspondents. Marr is fully signed up to the command-and-control Net Zero political agenda. Known as ‘Red Andy’ from his time at Cambridge, he has a first class degree in English. Thankfully, this qualification has not stopped him giving us the benefit of his views on a wide variety of political, economic, social and scientific matters during a 30-year career in journalism. It could be worse. He could be a PPE-ist.
Of course, at the heart of the BBC and Met Office complaints is a deep irritation that their ideology is being challenged. Investigation of the complex workings of the Earth’s atmosphere is still a substantial work in progress, and a great deal is open to debate. The ‘settled’ climate ideology is a political construct, designed to radically change and control economic and social lifestyles across the world. As with all ideologies, it relies on a great deal of faith, and the ruthless suppression of alternative narratives.
Global warming was the initial driver of this latest green campaign and when that started to run out of steam over 20 years ago ‘climate change’ became ‘climate breakdown’, with messages from the heavens in the form of bad weather events, then a ‘climate emergency’. But despite over 50 years of work, scientists are no nearer discovering how much global temperatures will rise, or fall, if carbon dioxide is doubled in the atmosphere. Consistently wrong climate models provide forecasts of thermogeddon based on guesses that temperatures will continue to rise. No science paper has yet been produced that proves conclusively that humans cause all or most climate change by burning fossil fuel, and ditto for the fanciful current suggestions that single event extreme weather is also caused by our wicked ways.
The climate writer Paul Homewood was unimpressed by the BBC’s recent reaction to criticism. A couple of years ago, he explained, the BBC senior management took the decision to build climate change indoctrination into regular programming, including weather forecasts. “It is unsurprising that viewers are now reacting,” he noted.
Over on the Watts Up With That? climate site, Eric Worrall made similar points, suggesting that the Met climate change clergy faced a social media uprising. He said Britain was in for a horror winter of spiralling price rises and shortages. In his opinion, this was “largely a consequence of a long-term Met Office and BBC climate scare campaign which undermined mainstream political support for reliable energy”.
Worrall is also clear that politics lies at the root of the climate change campaign. He suggests voting for politicians whose focus is on today’s problems. Even if they don’t win, politicians will be panicked into responding, he explained. “It will no longer matter what Met or BBC climate scaremongers believe or say, if they lose their position of influence,” he suggested.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
Stop Press: The Government recently awarded a contract for a company to advise on “Everything Net Zero”. The value? £70 billion over four years. Meanwhile, household energy bills continue to soar.
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