The popular prints are flooded with climate and weather misinformation. Net Zero, seen by increasing numbers of people as a looming disaster, is lauded to the skies. Few journalists investigate the ‘unsettled’ science behind unproven claims that humans cause most, if not all, changes in the climate. To point out that there are not enough minerals in the ground to make batteries to power humanity’s basic transportation needs, let alone store the energy required to keep us all alive in the cold when renewables go on strike, is simply not allowed. Needless to say, as we have seen in a number of recent Daily Sceptic articles, this absurd state of affairs is partly the product of a carefully-curated public discourse targeting cash-strapped news rooms and funded by a vast supply of dark, green money.
Recently I reported that the Mirror had run a nonsense story about much of London disappearing beneath the waves within 80 years. I noted that this was not the handiwork of a crack team of investigative reporters, but rather the placed work of a U.S. green activist group called Climate Central. This operation specialises in ready-to-publish climate change material highlighting local landmarks allegedly due to disappear beneath the waves. Similar tactics are used by another activist group spreading fear and alarm called Covering Climate Now (CC Now). This operation is run out of the Columbia Journalism Review in New York, and is backed by the Nation and the U.K. Guardian. Both operations rely heavily on large gifts from Left-leaning U.S. foundations.
CC Now was started in 2019 and claims to feed over 500 media operations with written stories and climate narratives. Its “partners” include some of the biggest names in news publishing such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse (AFP), CBS News, ABC News and MSNBC News. Leading journals are said to include Rolling Stone, Huff Post and Teen Vogue. The founders seek a “reframing” of the way journalists cover climate change. What this means in practice is amplifying an invented ‘climate emergency’ by constant story catastrophisation, while denying any inconvenient science. The political aim is the promotion of the command-and-control Net Zero agenda.
There is plenty of advice for tame journalists aiming to ramp up climate hysteria. “The fastest way to catch up is to emulate outlets that are already covering climate change well. You can’t do better than the Guardian,” CC Now suggests. But what to do about the problem that paying readers tend to disappear when fed a diet of spun political messages? “Foundations like Knight, Ford, McCormick and Emerson Collective are rightly increasing their support for local news organisations,” it adds.
Relentless catastrophising of individual weather events is the favoured weapon to spread climate fear among the wider population. Using the recent experience of the Covid pandemic, activists have been emboldened to spread panic and alarm in controllable media to achieve their wider political aims. Despite oft-made claims, it is impossible to use models to ‘attribute’ single weather events to long term changes in the climate. CC Now skirts this obvious problem by providing a number of helpful explanations for gullible journalists to copy-and-paste. “Climate change isn’t solely to blame for extreme weather, but… it stacks the deck against us… it’s baked in with our weather and often a key ingredient in the outcome… it supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.” Journalists are told to emphasise the human impacts of extreme weather, noting that it affects “the poor, communities of colour, and indigenous groups first and foremost”.
All this sterling work, of course, deserves prizes. The 2022 CC Now Journalism Awards “honoured” writers producing the “strongest coverage of the onrushing climate emergency and its abundant solutions”. Winners are said to have come from the Guardian, AFP, Al Jazeera, PBS NewsHour and the Los Angeles Times. Journalist of the Year was Time Senior Correspondent Justin Worland. The judges singled out for particular praise an article he wrote ahead of COP26 titled, “The Energy Transition in Full Swing. It’s Not Happening Fast Enough“.
Billionaire-run foundations are spending enormous sums promoting junk alarmist science, in addition to funding on-side academic institutions and other influential bodies. Both Climate Central and CC Now are funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, while Climate Central takes support from the Grantham fund. This latter foundation is connected with the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, and also partly funds three U.K. university institutes. At the LSE, this operation provides material that supports the Net Zero initiatives.
Jeremy Grantham is a long-time promoter of Net Zero and a future based on renewables. But it is not only journalists he has in his sights. Speaking in 2019 to a group of business people in Copenhagen about the approaching apocalypse, he asked rhetorically, “What should I do, you say”? His suggestion: “You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.”
The science writer and climatologist Dr. Judith Curry has become increasingly concerned about the effect of all this propaganda on children. In a recent essay, she wrote that it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that children are being used as tools in adults’ political agenda surrounding climate change. This is having adverse impacts on the mental health of children, she warned. The apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the climate ‘crisis’ has numerous victims, she added. “Children and young adults rank among the victims of greatest concern.”
Children and young adults are being used as tools in national and international political campaigns, continued Dr. Curry. “Blaming this unfortunate situation of psychological stress on a changing climate is incorrect, and the use of the situation to achieve political goals is reprehensible behaviour that is acting to reinforce the children’s psychological injuries,” she charged.
Your correspondent’s advice: When you next see an identikit climate Armageddon story in the mainstream media, just laugh. You will be the sanest person in the room.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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‘Renewables’? How are rare metals (some not so rare, but lithium certainly is), renewable? Cui bono from the mining and usage of such minerals? Does little Gaia magically manufacture these elements and minerals? How is bird chopping and eco devastation from panels and turbines ‘renewable’? How are they manufactured, transported and setup on site? How are they maintained? How much oil needs to grease the bird slicers? How often is it changed? How do you charge your EV? What happens when it dies? etc etc. etc
The stupid of the modern age, really f*ing hurts.
Not to mention that the windmills must keep turning, even when there is no wind (i.e. they use electricity to rotate). If they are stationary for too long, the bearings become unbalanced.
There is the bigger broader agenda of Social Justice and Sustainable Development, for which Climate Change is just a tool. Or as George Chirac pointed out some years ago that Kyoto was a “genuine component of world governance”. Global treaty’s like Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris enable progressives to work around National Interests, because national interests have no place in their World order. We now have the “International Community” and under the guise of stabilising the climate, infact climate is really just the means by which activists as part of this “Community” can achieve world governance based on progressivism. But because temperatures are not rising as climate models projected, extreme weather has become the new means to insist humans are interfering in climate. Every storm, food or drought is because of our greenhouse gasses, with zero evidence for that., but when you have a compliant media telling the whole of the western world on the 6 o’clock news that we have a “climate emergency” who needs evidence? When no one can falsify any of this “crisis” stuff (1) It isn’t science, and (2) It isn’t evidence of anything, it is just the language of politics. or as Richard Lindzen pointed out —————“Climate alarm belongs to a class of issues for which there is no evidence and is characterised as immorality pretending to virtue”.
It’s not just fear and panic. It’s a marketing tactic, with a profit to make, from equipment manufacturing, and maintenance, disposing of scrap, and so on.
A statement like
Climate change isn’t solely to blame for extreme weather, but… it stacks the deck against us… it’s baked in with our weather and often a key ingredient in the outcome… it supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.
is content-free fear-mongering. It’s actually even worse than that: Literally, this is complete nonsense. Climate change isn’t a rational actor trying to get us by cheating (stacking the deck), life isn’t a poker play with possibly stacked decks, nobody knows exactly what a weather pattern is supposed to be, let alone a normal one, as opposed to an unnormal one (how can one tell one from the other?) and there’s certainly not way to charge or even supercharge patterns.
The only meaning of this sentence is someting like An inhuman, shady entity with magic superpowers is seeking to ensnare and ruin you! Beware! Be afraid! Be very afraid! Sounds awfully like the traditional Puritan story of Satan lurking in the wilderness to corrupt and destroy the good people (of Salem, to wit). In more rational times, people making such statements would have been laughed out of of house (or put into a sanatorium).
Another neat take down of how climate emergency journalism works from the pen of Mr Morrison. Keep it up.
I am a sensible environmentalist but these extremist climate activists and policies are destroying true environmentalism. Their policies and actions are so politicized and impractical and not based on any engineering, they are destroying the environment themselves. Wind turbines and electric cars are not environmentally friendly nor sustainable. They direct funds away from real environmental problems such as garbage management, sewage disposal and over use of pesticides, to name just a few issues.
I don’t think anyone truly knows how much human activity affects weather and climate, there are too many variables, but surely the huge change to forest cover especially across the equator has an impact? Trouble is politicians and globalists have latched onto CO2 theories as a way to gain leverage and impose their command and control agendas on us, even though those theories now seem to be wrong.