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.
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It is only an alleged “cure”.
The “97% consensus”, which we know is highly dubious anyway, is about the only figure the climate zealots produce to prove their point. That’s not surprising in a world which is devoid of proper debate around actual measurements but flush with carefully orchestrated narrative. I’ve no doubt there was once a 97% consensus the Earth was flat and the sun was in orbit around it. Consensus is often not proof of anything except groupthink
This consensus is itself nonsensical. It is well known within the earth sciences that the climate intimately interacts with atmospheric, geological and solar forces. It is arrogantly anthropocentric to claim that we can assert a greater influence than any of these things!
I work a great deal with videos that include material on climate. Old ones from 20-25 years ago, before stuffy old Al Gore and Greta ‘Looney Tune’ Thunberg got in on the act, say humans can’t affect the weather. New ones say we cause it all!
There’s plenty to worry about with pollution. The street I lived next to in London was 15-hour traffic jam, pumping out all sorts of toxins that we’re breathing in. There’s plenty of poison in fuels and other substances used in manufacturing to worry about, which the modern obsession with CO2 has buried.
In fact, part of me wonders if Net Zero is a convenient distraction so all sorts of other poisons can carry on being used, unobserved while people obsess about CO2, which is akin to Boris Johnson’s ‘invisible mugger’.
Actually, there’s a valid comparison between ‘invisible mugger’ CO2, COVID-19 and the Church’s old claims that drove people into a religious frenzy about the Devil hovering beside you, invisibly, manipulating your behaviour.
There’s nothing like claiming something people can’t see is at the root of their woes to make them paranoid.
The 97% is a made up figure.
“Consensus” certainly isn’t science.
When I studied Biochemistry back in the late 1960s our Professor told us that if anyone told us that there was a scientific consensus then they would have their hands in our back pockets
The 97% can only be claimed because the scientists with a contrary view are cut off, censored or denied expressing their views and the clear information which demonstrates that the net zero nutters are wrong. Hopefully in time those with the accurate information will be heard and their numbers will show how wrong the 97% figure is and there is no scientific consensus for net zero.
Congratulations! Top 10, I’m impressed.
We need to get back to honest open discussions without trying to shut down the opposing views before they are heard.
But that would mean the Establishment’s lies would be exposed.
That is why scepticism, dis/misinformation must be crushed.
The entire basis of the modern scientific method was a rejection of the then religion-based consensus about the material world (re the sun revolving around the earth etc.) and its replacement with open-ended experimentation and fact based research.
Challenges followed by potential improvements are not just allowed but positively encouraged. Indeed it is fully understood that the greatest breakthroughs often do emerge from lone projects which go against any current grain of thinking.
Overall it’s not too much of a stretch to call the genuine and progressive scientific approach the sceptical one.
The very fact that the idea of ‘consensus’ is again being used and any technical criticisms rejected outright (eg labelled as ‘disinformation’ / heresy) in relation to ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change’ shows that we have gone full circle back to medieval dogma and ignorance.
The alleged “97 percent scientific consensus” is routinely pulled out of the bag as a blunt knee-jerk response to arguments made by those whom activists fondly refer to as “climate deniers”.
This figure, however, originates in a 2013 meta-analysis of scientific opinion authored by John Cook, an Australian climatologist, who recruited a small team of volunteers to analyse the abstracts of roughly 12,000 scientific papers. In each instance, the volunteer was instructed to fit his or her conclusion of the abstract into one of seven different categories that ranged the spectrum of explicit endorsement of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) all the way down to explicit rejection of CAGW. Of all the papers analysed, around 60% did not express any clear view on climate change (i.e. neutral). These were OMITTED from the final tally, dramatically distorting the actual percentage of those who (either implicitly or explicitly) endorsed the idea that humans primarily cause climate change!
Furthermore, the volunteers got their interpretation of the abstracts completely wrong: A follow-up corroborative analysis, conducted by Cook himself, consisted of him contacting a representative sample of the original authors of the papers to verify whether the conclusions arrived at during the Cook analysis lined up with the conclusions drawn by the scientists who conducted the relevant studies. In a very significant portion of cases, the answer was no, they did not – reducing the real percentage yet further!
If any conclusion could have been drawn from this study, the most sensible one would have been that most scientists agree that humans have some impact on the trajectory of the climate, however negligibly small this impact may be.
An alternative, given the 60% of papers omitted from the final count, would be that the majority of scientists have no clear opinion either way on CAGW!
But that doesn’t go too far in championing the cause of the alarmists and the net-zero fanatics, does it?
The 97% figure is used as a sop to experts ‘Look, the experts agree on this, so theres no need for you to think critically about it, in fact you’ll just confuse and frustrate yourself and come up with the wrong answer. You dont need to do that. We’ve already done it. Let us take care of it all for you.’.
Yeah, right…
I believe I am right that in saying that when the numbers of that study are analysed, the 97% actually represents about 75 scientists. Not really very impressive.
It’s very simple. The AGW protagonists always refer to data that is known to have been gerrymandered and use models that are known not to have accurate constants, don’t actually model the past because the starting points are unknown, and fail to include effects that are very complex and difficult to model in addition to some things that are important but are ignored.
The AGW sceptics point to known data from modern analysis and use satellite data that is accurate and difficult to misinterpret.
AGW is not happening, won’t happen and cannot happen because the laws of thermodynamics make it impossible. Those laws are implacable and anyone mounting a successful challenge to them will have to do a lot of work.
The whole shebang is political and driven by people who both want ever more money and influence and hate their fellow humans. If there’s going to be a cull of population then a fairly small one starting with these deranged idiots is all that is needed.
The anti-truther Times muppets aren’t even showing information. Get Oliver Wright writing on the latest big pharma corruption scandals, you muppets!
Was the Spanish Inquisition interested in a free and open debate about the Articles of Faith the Catholic Church espoused?
No.
Neither are the Cardinals of the Climate Change/Net Zero Religion.
In both cases, extermination is the preferred method of those daring to question their Dogma.
The claims of the Climate Change Religion can’t be substantiated with FACTS. And they know it, hence you are not allowed to present FACTS for debate.
Kudos Toby kudos. Keep up the good work and liked your point about whether The Sunday Times would report the thalidomide scandal today or would they be afraid of “the science”.
This is the same thing we saw in lockdown: people start using a word without entirely understanding its meaning until it enters the public consciousness. Lockdown saw ‘libertarian’ turned into a pejorative term. Climate activists have used the term ‘denier’ fully aware of its Holocaust links. ‘Refuseniks’, with its ties to the Soviet Union and ill treatment of Jewish people, entered regular usage for people using their right not to be injected with an experimental drug. ‘Disinformation’, the deliberate dissemination of lies masquerading as facts in order to sow confusion – with its history in Cold War tactics – is the latest example of the use of language manipulation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nudge Unit wasn’t involved in this somewhere.
I think it’s the ultimate revenge of the left: their supporters were caught out in the 1950s by McCarthy and HUAC, who (correctly as it turns out) went after communists in Hollywood seeking to bring down the West, so now they try to use language to try to link people who believe in the West’s historic views on freedom to Russia.
So the Times once a source of accurate information has lost that reputation and its readers should be told. Chris Morrison’s pieces about Climate are always based on facts, which are nearly always uncomfortable for the net zero nutters, and which they do everything they can to surpress. Elon Musk’s takeover of twitter has enabled a more open range of information about climate change, including actual facts that are contrary to the line of those with vested interests claiming that its all the result of human generated CO2 which soon everyone will know it isn’t.
Why are the people who sign up to the green agenda so quick to label those who disagree as ‘deniers’ or ‘conspiracy theorists’?’
Rehearse the following formula, or suitably tailored variation, as a standard reply to the charge ‘denier’:
You are the deniers. You deny that there is nothing to the entire global-warming alarm but the predictions of totally discredited computer models. You deny there has been no global warming at all over the entire 34-year span of the current climate ‘crisis’, inaugurated in July-88 by Hansen and Gore, except a gentle one-third of one-degree C rise, which is entirely in line with the 1-degree-C-per-century re-warming of the earth that has been going on, with no human agency, since the end of the Little Ice Age, 200 or so years ago
.
Here are another 2 pieces of “Misinformation” (1) Climate emergency is not a scientific term, it is a political one, to make it appear that climate emergency is something we can all see in front of us like a pillar box or an elephant. But I have seen pillar boxes and elephants, so I know they exist. (2) When we hear “listen to the science” it isn’t science at all we are being asked to listen to. It is climate models, but models are NOT science, and they are NOT evidence of anything. ———You find that everywhere you look we are presented with pronouncements about a “climate crisis” but it is mostly a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a “climate emergency” for which no real evidence exists in support of politics. Only by understanding those politics can you see why insisting there is a “climate emergency” is essential if you are to achieve the political goal, which is to reduce on demand energy and replace it with unreliable energy because the western world is deemed to have used up more than it’s fair share of fossil fuels. But ofcourse we also see poor countries discouraged from using fossil fuels and bribed to use wind. But this is quite tragic since 2 billion people currently have only enough electricity to power a fridge, and another one billion have no electricity at all. This is a truly unthinkable for people in the wealthy west……….Just imagine it for a second —One billion people with no electricity. It is a diabolical disgrace.
“Anthropogenic…could be true”?
Courage, Mr Young. Yes, urban heat island effect, but that’s about it. The idea that co2 drives dangerous runaway global warming is simply wrong. From low atmospheric concentrations, as at the coldest point of an ice age, you do get some warming as co2 follows temperature in the upswing. It is a “greenhouse gas”, just not very important one. But the effect becomes saturated. Doubling from here would add about one degree centigrade. Great!
https://wvanwijngaarden.info.yorku.ca/files/2021/03/WPotency.pdf?x45936
Kill the co2 connection and you stop decarbonisation, and all its unnecessary harms.
Wondering what bikini to wear in London today. The Guardian/BBC/Times have been telling me for years about global warming and how ‘children will grow up not knowing what snow is’, today will be a scorcher, around 2c. The deeply held religious belief of the climate clowns is one of China’s most successful west-destroying propaganda successes of recent years.