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Climate Change Scepticism and ‘Disinformation’ are Not the Same Thing

by Toby Young
8 December 2022 11:00 AM
A participant holds a drawing depicting Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg during a protest march to call for action against climate change, in The Hague, Netherlands September 27, 2019. REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

A participant holds a drawing depicting Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg during a protest march to call for action against climate change, in The Hague, Netherlands September 27, 2019. REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

In my Spectator column today I’ve responded to a piece in the Times that identified me as one of the worst offenders in Britain when it comes to spreading ‘disinformation’ about climate change on Twitter. In other words, my tweets sharing Chris Morrison’s articles for the Daily Sceptic are widely shared. To my mind, that’s evidence of the public’s appetite for an evidence-based debate about the ‘climate emergency’ and Net Zero. But that’s not how the Times sees it.

According to a quote in a recent article by the Environment Editor of the Times, I’m “the most prominent U.K. public figure” whose posts on Twitter related to “climate scepticism” are “heavily shared”. This was based on an analysis commissioned by the paper from two researchers at the University of London, Max Falkenberg and Andrea Baronchelli. Apparently, 10 Twitter handles account for 25% of the most widely shared sceptical tweets – and mine is one of them!

When the journalist contacted me asking for a comment, I initially took this as an opportunity for a humble-brag: “I daresay there’s only a tiny handful of people on Twitter questioning the climate emergency agenda, so if just one person shares your tweet you’re automatically in the top 10 for most widely shared.” But then I realised the journalist did not think of this as a badge of honour. “Two researchers have named you in a piece of analysis about climate change disinformation,” he explained.

Hang on a sec. Disinformation? Falkenberg and Baronchelli were asked to do this analysis because they published a study in Nature Climate Change about the growing polarisation between climate activists and climate sceptics. Looking at Twitter data between 2014 and 2021, they found an increase in the prevalence of ‘climate contrarians’ on the platform – people like me – but the word ‘disinformation’ doesn’t appear in their report other than in a footnote. Nor does it appear in their more recent piece of analysis done for the paper, as far as I can tell. The Times’s environment editor just took it for granted that anyone challenging the evidence that we’re in the midst of a man-made ‘climate emergency’ is guilty of spreading ‘disinformation’.

To be fair to him, he did include a quote from me pointing out that it’s not the fact of climate change that I’m sceptical about, but the claim that it’s anthropogenic. I think that could be true, but the evidence isn’t compelling enough to justify the Net-Zero policy. It’s likely more people than usual will die of cold this winter as a result of the increased cost of heating our homes and disruption to the energy supply, both of which are partly due to intergovernmental efforts to reduce the West’s reliance on coal and gas. Are we confident the cure won’t be worse than the disease, as it almost certainly was in the case of lockdown? Whenever I hear the phrase ‘the science’, I reach for my revolver.

The point of the Times article is to raise the alarm about the ‘surge’ in climate-sceptic posts on Twitter since Elon Musk took over. It quotes a UN official who is “alarmed at reports of a flood of climate disinformation“ on the platform, and a scientist condemning “climate disinformation” and “denial”. We’re asked to lament the fact Twitter didn’t act as “the voice of COP27” last month, something it was planning to do before Musk threw a spanner in the works. God forbid he should allow an open discussion.

Why are the people who sign up to the green agenda so quick to label those who disagree as ‘deniers’ or ‘conspiracy theorists’? Why smear my climate-sceptic tweets as ‘disinformation’? It suggests they’re not as intellectually confident as they appear, in spite of using phrases such as ‘overwhelming scientific consensus’ and ‘97% of scientists believe that humans are the cause of global warming’. Indeed, such appeals to authority suggest a paucity of hard evidence.

Worth reading in full.

Tags: Climate ScepticismCOP27DenialDisinformationTwitter

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24 Comments
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huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
3 months ago

“swapping out”

Oh dear. Criticising the very things being criticised. Swapping is sufficient.

Last edited 3 months ago by huxleypiggles
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Running Dog
Running Dog
3 months ago
Reply to  huxleypiggles

A fair point, and well spotted… and happy to be corrected… but does it really invalidate the argument as a whole?

0
0
JXB
JXB
3 months ago

How? In 1945 the British population voted Marxist-socialist workers control the means of production, Comrade and sold out its manufacturing base (and soul) in exchange for – bang pans – an NHS and cradle-to-grave welfare state – free stuff, everyone leeching off each other.

It’s simple. Nationalise key industries, instead of profits going to greedy capitalists, redistribution to pay for NHS, free stuff, fairness, equality – brothers.

Result: capital to fund, expand, develop, only available from the taxpayer. Not enough. Borrow and print money. Still not enough. Chronic underinvestment. The workers collective demands more and more. Industry becomes bloated, uncompetitive. That profit disappears so borrow, print money to pay the shortfall and pay the increasing cost of NHS and welfare state.

Brain drain. Underinvestment, poor pay, high taxes, drives out best and brightest – engineers, scientists, designers – abroad particularly the USA and into their aerospace industry.

British aerospace collapses, car making is a joke, strikes daily – the end of the UK as a giant of tech development and innovation.

Result: £2.8 trillion debt, 7 million on (bang pans) NHS waiting list, and in 2023 220 000 died waiting… but had they lived treatment would have “free”… yippee!, a welfare state supporting 10 million impoverished immigrants, dependence on the Chinese command economy for what we consume.

Hurrah! And… full circle. 2025 UK population votes in Marxist-Socialist Labour Party and is shocked to learn it’s Marxist-Socialist and hasn’t kept its manifesto pwomises, the wotters, how beastly.

Those old enough will remember police, fire, ambulance with dignified British bells, not those common Continental – Hee, haw, hee, haw… klaxons.

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Running Dog
Running Dog
3 months ago
Reply to  JXB

I grew up with the two-tone klaxon so that’s all that I recall (we’re all products of our era, right?). Happy to endorse the British bell being brought back to service.

0
0
RW
RW
3 months ago

The classic parable of British industry would be: In Victorian times, someone invested a lot capital in building a factory somewhere in England. This factory made him and his descendeds very wealthy/ insanely rich and was kept running with minimal investments in maintenance until about the 1970s when the Victorian machinery finally broke down and couldn’t be repaired anymore. At this point, one of two things happened:

  1. The family chose to become altogether economically inactive save managing its considerable property.
  2. A new factory somewhere overseas where labour costs were much cheaper was constructed as replacement.

This is a story I part invented but I think it’s an accurate picture: The empire had served its purpose after the British elite had accumulated more wealth than most people can even think of. And since it was sort-of cumbersome and expensive to maintain, it was then dismantled using more or less poor pretexts (“Winds of change” etc). What remained was a British moor who had done his job and could go now.

3
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RW
RW
3 months ago

How this process really started: From some time in the 19th century until 1914, Britain was the world’s dominant industrial, military and financial power. Closest competitor were the aspiring German Empire. The USA was mostly a rural and very much indebted backwater. Then, the so-called first world war started which people in Germany regarded as a combined attack on them driven by a French desire for Revenge for 1871!
and an English desire to get rid of England’s most successful economic competitor.

In autumn and winter 1914, the war had frozen in place along a line of fortified trenches running from the Belgian cost just westward of Ostend southwards and then eastwards through northern France to the east of the fortress of Verdun and from there southward to the Swiss border. The next three years saw yearly repeated anglo-french attempts to break through this line of trenches with every increasing use of preparatory artillery barrages followed by infantry attacks. This needed an enormous amount of artillery shells as tenthousands to hundredthousands of shots would be fired for any individual run of artillery attacks. Most of these shells were manufactured in the USA because enough workers where available there as the country didn’t participated in the war itself until 1918 and they were paid for by the British and French state borrowing money from American banks. The final outcome was that the USA became the world’s largest creditor and the British empire one of the largest debtors.

This pattern repeated during the second world war where military hardware on the Allied side was by-and-large all produced in the USA and then lent-out on use now pay later terms to the other Allied powers.

4
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FerdIII
FerdIII
3 months ago

Totally agree.

US empire indeed. Britain is just a US state in many ways. Oddly, this American-state joined the US Empire’s German project called the EU. It then disentangled itself to further submit its interests to the War-Virology-NWO-WEF-CIA regime of the US Empire.

NWO is simply US hegemony. The Uketopian war is just an expression of the US empire’s quest to destroy Russia. That is why Vlad the Invader had to get busy in 2022 when poof! the Rona magically disappeared, though morons were stabbinated long after for the fake virus. The UK has played a most useful idiot in its screaming support for the US occupation of the Ukeland, pushing us to a nuclear confrontation. Well done UK.

Rona fascism, the Climate Con, WEF – all the NWO globalist institutions are somehow linked to the US Dystopian NWO

Rule Brittania? Nah, The Fools in Britannia more like it.

2
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stewart
stewart
3 months ago

There is a completely different take to the last 70 years, and that is that old Europe has been dominating the US in the manner of a dominating wife in a traditional wife role who basically has her husband do all her bidding. (Not a statement about men and women, just an example of one particular archetype.)

The US protects Europe. And if Trump’s narrative is to be believed, Europe fleeces the US economically.

The telltale is the reaction to the US wanting to change the relationship. The old European powers are up in arms and in disarray over the prospect that things aren’t going to carry on as they were.

That is certainly not the reaction you’d expect from the subservient, badly treated side.

1
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RW
RW
3 months ago
Reply to  stewart

‘The US’ shares access to some of its military infrastructure, especially in the area of satellite reconnaissance, with its NATO partners, and the NATO is procedurally geared towards being led by American officers. As always, the American armament industry also plays a prominent role here but in form of providing products in exchange for money. Lastly, the USA still has quite a lot of nukes and thus, maintain the nuclear balance of power, of however questionable usefulness this might be. Both Great Britain and France have their own nuclear deterrent and France isn’t even part of the military structures of the NATO since de Gaulle withdrew from them. Germany, as usual, is prohibited from owning or controlling any nukes. Great reason for Trump to whine about it not having any.

The USA has a standing army of less than 500,000 soldiers and the combined forces of the European NATO states easily outnumber that. Further, Germany, traditionally one of the larger military powers in Europe, is prohibited from maintaining more than a pretty tokenistic military force by the so-called “2 + 4 treaty” where the USA was a part of the 4 (the two were the FRG and the GDR). There’s no “US protection” in this area. A nice example of this would be the Enhanced Forward Presence of the NATO in Eastern Middle Europe: This is exclusively European in all areas where even a remote danger exists while pretty nominal US troops are only in safe positions in in eastern Poland.

2
0
stewart
stewart
3 months ago
Reply to  RW

Well, you better get in touch with all the European leaders to let them know because they all seem in a panic about the poential withdrawal of US military protection.

1
0
RW
RW
3 months ago
Reply to  stewart

You’d better come up with some kind of counter-argument in case you want to prove my statement wrong instead of jumping to making untrue statements about a different topic.

You also still haven’t answered the question what kind protection the UK derives from serving as sort-of an US aircraft carrier for offensive military operations elsewhere.

2
0
Art Simtotic
Art Simtotic
3 months ago

Innocent ascriber inclined to Micawberomics here. Article and preceding comments amount to – Follow the money, the militarism and the myths?

1
0
Jon Garvey
Jon Garvey
3 months ago

Sirens? Pah! Ambulances should have bells.

5
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
3 months ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

They had the Green Goddesses on a brief return during the Fire strike back in 2002.

Last edited 3 months ago by Ron Smith
1
0
Jaguar
Jaguar
3 months ago

Britain’s economic and military decline is the product of an education system biased towards the Arts rather than science, and towards pure science rather than technology and engineering. The madness of Net Zero could only happen in a country run by people who are completely clueless about engineering and technology.
Britain’s participation in the “war on terror” (and the disastrous failure of that war) stems from a common failure to understand islam on the part of both Britain and Americans.

3
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
3 months ago
Reply to  Jaguar

As Julian Assange puts it, the Afghan War was a long protracted money laundering operation by design.

0
0
Art Simtotic
Art Simtotic
3 months ago
Reply to  Jaguar

‘Twas ever thus. Back in the 1960s, my father (an engineering lecturer at a Technical College, that later morphed into a Poly offering Business Studies, and is now a University offering a degree course in Comedy Studies) lamented the arts and humanities graduates running the country.

I’d extend “technology and engineering” to encompass trades like electrician and plumber that require technical knowledge and practical skill. Usually well-grounded and in demand, in my experience.

Last edited 3 months ago by Art Simtotic
1
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PeterM
PeterM
3 months ago

Presumably the book doesn’t deal with the way membership of the EU meanwhile chewed at Britain’s administrative legs making it insecure in standing on its own after Brexit.
Presumably, when Starmer says record investment is coming in to the UK he means more of our home-grown enterprise is being bought by foreigners.

1
0
David
David
3 months ago

Dear oh dear that ‘special relationship’ notion again. Old Mother Britain (or should it be England?) still thinking of the USA as her little baby, failing to notice the larger number of German and other European populations among its 19 C settlers, and of course numerous other nationalities whose influence on US character and interests is more important.

Like it or not societies need leaders because the majority of any population want no more than secure sources of food, warmth and shelter without having to fight for them. Our British leading class blundered into the 1914 war, destroyed itself and has been replaced by others pursuing personal gain in much larger markets for money, goods and ideas.

0
0
adamcollyer
adamcollyer
3 months ago

If you are running a humongous trade deficit, which we are and have been for decades, you have to export something to pay for those imports. And we have been exporting our industries themselves. We have been selling our country for trinkets.

The alternative is to have a huge devaluation in your currency. Personally I would prefer that. (Sterling does seem to be significantly overvalued, with computer equipment that costs £1,000 in the UK for example, costing $1,000 in the USA.) But people don’t like that. The trinkets get expensive.

There is one other alternative of course. Reciprocal tariffs to keep out artificially cheap imports. But the great and good tell us that could never work so obviously it’s a non-starter.

0
0

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