One of the top Western U.S. broadcast meteorologists hit out recently at “clickbait” stories that demonised every major weather event. Don Daly, often referred to as ‘Wyoming’s weatherman’ said that politicians, media and environmental group’s constant mantra that every national weather event is somehow the result of human activity, “is intellectually dishonest”. Most climate news stories were “heavy in anecdotes and light in any data”, said Day, who syndicates to over 70 stations.
According to the report in the online publication Cowboy State Daily, climate clickbait stories follow a formula that includes claims of impending doom, reference to non-atmospheric scientists, cherry-picked or misleading data, and a suggestion that we all change our ways and ‘do what we say’. Day says that reporters will often interview people who offer personal anecdotes, and then try to frame their stories as another sign of man-made climate change. Ignored by most media are stories that do not fit the narrative such as the last tornado season, that was one of the least active.
The role of the media in driving a political narrative around climate is also of concern to the science writer and former economics professor Roger Pielke Jr., who noted last month that climate journalism has evolved from reporting news to narrative. “I’m calling out climate journalism because I am seeing its pathological effects on public views, especially among young people, on the research community and in policy discussions, including political advocacy. Climate is too important to be just another cul-de-sac of identity politics,” he said.
According to Pielke, it has become fundamental to the climate agenda to associate every extreme event, happening every day, with climate change. “There are studies to cherry-pick, quotable experts and a new cottage industry of rapid event attribution studies. Extreme weather is no longer about the weather,” he observed. This need to feed the climate beast leads to a knock-on effect of creating incentives for researchers to produce studies with links to climate – “no matter how tenuous or trivial”.
As regular readers will recall, we have frequently noted that the switch to demonising bad weather has occurred because global warming ran out of steam about 25 years ago. According to end April data, the UAH satellite record shows a current pause of nearly nine years in length. State weather services have needed little encouragement to run with the single weather narrative to help promote the collectivist Net Zero project.
The U.K. Met Office is proud of its new claimed temperature record of 40.3°C from last July 19th, despite doubts being raised about the fact it lasted for only 60 seconds and was taken halfway down a military airbase runway. At times, broadcast weather maps in the U.K. turning orange and vivid red during the summer recall the TV mock Latin weatherwoman on The Fast Show, and her constant comic catchphrase, “Scorchio!”. In Australia, it appears that the Bureau of Meteorology has been claiming recent one-second heat records following the switch from mercury to highly accurate electronic sensors.
In the United States, local media outlets broadcasting weather information have been targeted by Climate Central, a green agitprop operation funded by many Left-wing foundations such as the Schmidt, Grantham and Hewlett funds. A sub-group called Climate Matters aims to bring climate change into weathercasting “via local voices highly trusted by Americans everywhere”. Over the last decade, it has produced a “weather underground” said to be a “coast-to coast network of TV weathercasters who believe that educating their audiences about global warming is as crucial as telling them to bring an umbrella”. Kaitlyn McGrath, a meteorologist at WUSA9, helpfully reveals: “To a lot of our viewers, it’s lost on them how much Climate Matters really is doing. But it is so far from lost on us”.
In a recent essay on climate sceptic Dr. Judith Curry’s blog, David Young draws connections between the politicisation of science during the Covid pandemic and climate change. “The complete playbook that made climate science’s culture deteriorate was deployed to Covid science and epidemiology, making meaningful scientific debate virtually impossible,” he writes. In the U.S., narrative-driven media consists of little more than ideologically-driven – and partially state-controlled – purveyors of carefully screened information. This invariably supports the views of elites in the West – “and the public is becoming more and more convinced that they cannot be trusted,” says Young.
Young draws attention to the growth in recent years of a large ‘disinformation’ industry, a category he describes as largely meaningless with no well-defined content. Over the last 30 years, “realistic” scientists have been cancelled, and now political operatives, activists, the media and often the deep state and some scientists, “compete to see who can be in the forefront of rounding up the witches who spread disinformation and burning them”. Young writes that many of the tactics of the disinformation complex are rationalised as being necessary to combat threats to democracy. But he argues that the war on ‘disinformation’ is itself a threat to the democratic process, noting the view of the great Covid sceptic Professor John Ioannidis that democracy cannot function if the public is fed a “constant diet of half-truths and even disinformation, with dissenting voices systematically excluded”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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There is no shortage of dishonest, low quality education on the topic of meteorology, including apparently deliberate confusion between climate and weather, even environmental issues. All of that is tangled with the concept of our ability to influence it, or what can be done to manage our capacity to adapt to it.
Some of us have been around long enough to remember some of the significant variations, such as the 1962/63 winter weather, the 1976 heatwave & drought and a few others, like the winter floods in 2014, and 2020. It seems to me that every year varies quite a lot when you are involved in the detail effects, in particular with gardening or farming.
And those who’ve been around long enough to remember significant weather ‘events’ are those that they need rid of.. pronto.. they stain the narrative.. Put that man on a drip asap… of midazolam/morphine..
Extreme Weather is not Climate Change
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Dishonest seems charitable. Seems more like evil to me. Part of the war being waged on humanity.
You know something’s going on when now they’ve got to give every two-bit depression crossing the Atlantic a name.. Storm whatever.. anyone?
Indeed and it really pfizzes me off.
Chris – thank you. Keep at it – we’re with your every word.
Fwiw, there is defo a hunger for data and hard numbers – I posted a colloquial explanation and then some quite technical language below a bug eating piece in today’s Daily Telegraph, along with the link to the peer reviewed paper, to explain why chitin was toxic to humans, and it was astonishingly well received.
People are sick of being taken for idiots and realise that they have to buck up and study a bit if they are to triumph in intellectual debate against the morons in the predator class.
Ah.. the “predator class” so much more apt than the elite..
They’re more parasites than predators.
Hi AEC can you post a link to the article? It’s the devil to find anything in that rag…could be under business, sport, food …heaven only knows! Thanks.
If it’s getting warmer, when am I going to notice it?
I’ve been keeping a nature diary since 2011. There is no evidence of warming but some that it has got drier.
The cold spell last winter killed three beautiful shrubs in my garden that had thrived for at least 18 years.
Scorchio
People are protesting, gluing themselves to roads, stopping traffic, climbing onto bridges etc etc, all based on what they see on TV News. You can put your TV on day after day and see claims made by all manner of people that extreme weather is increasing or there are more floods and droughts all they say is caused by humans. Every bit of extreme weather that occurs anywhere in the world is beamed directly to our TV screens and this might give the impression that everything in the world is getting worse, but that is all it is ———-An Impression? But is it true? The answer is NO. ——–There is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event anywhere in the world. Virtually everything we hear on the issue of climate change is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for which no observational evidence exists.—- No politician dares to question any of this dogma, as the flak they get would be career ending. How extraordinary that asking questions about something that is only occurring in speculative climate models but not in the real world gets you booted out of wherever you are and never to be seen again. We have recently amended the Climate Change Act (2008 Miliband) to now go even further and we are apparently to be NET ZERO by 2050. No one knows how it can possibly be done, how many trillions it will cost or even if the technology required can even be invented. This is preposterous. The United Nations have manufactured a CRISIS and are now dictating the SOLUTION to it all based not on reality but on virtual reality from un-validated models and speculations motivated entirely by the Politics of “Sustainable Development, which means a world run by unaccountable technocrats who will control all of the worlds wealth and resources and every aspect of people’s lives, and not only do many of us fall for this, we actually march with banners to DEMAND it.
The trouble with net zero projections by 2050 is as you say; vague. There isn’t enough money, natural resources, industrial processing capability, infrastructure for supply, engineering or technical advancement, and the necessary man power to facilitate each function, etc. to achieve this target, anywhere in this world. This simple fact is missing from the driven agenda. In 2016 the UK committed by law, to achieve net zero by 2050. (34 years) and after 7 years, (20% of agenda time) nothing has been done, started, or developed. It is still a talking shop, producing fear, with nothing that will facilitate the net zero targets, we here on this site, understand the 8ollox of it, but there is a lot more who believe. As you say, the governments have moved from being for the benefits par se of the nation to the servants of the few. The rest of us are being sent to where ever we can do least damage. Surplus to requirement.
‘,,,we actually march with banners to DEMAND it.’
You touch very correctly on the key point here. People want it to be true. I recall the old House-of-Commons Speaker George Thomas commenting on how he recovered his religious faith after episodes of doubt: ‘I want to believe,’ he declared. So many people persist with the belief in disastrous man-made climate change despite the fact that they know it is rubbish. They want it to be true. Something has to be wrong to explain how they feel about their lives. This is something to get behind en masse. Therefore this is what is wrong. I don’t think anything can be done to stop it.
Sadly, similar to the UK met office, weather manipulation is denied. Geoengineering going on right in front of our eyes,every single day. Look up, you will see dozens of chem trails, a constant. Who is funding this. What government/company is being used to spray chemicals into the atmosphere. The UK now in its 4th month of gloom, little sunshine, windy every day. Humans, plants and animals all need sunshine. Without it our planet and its creatures would not exist.
Even Chat GPT is on board with climageddon. I asked it why the theory of AGW was wrong and it basically told me it wasn’t. There’s no hope for the sheeple masses.
I suspect that we are going to see increasingly extreme weather and a hostile climate but it has nothing to do with humanity. The powers that be have known for decades, possibly centuries, that we are due a magnetic pole reversal which occurs every 12,000 years with the passage of the galactic current sheet. As part of this process the magnetic field deteriorates rapidly and has been accelerating since 1997 when the magnetic poles also began migrating and look set to cross around Indonesia sometime in the next 10-20 years. This will expose the earth to space weather and solar storms which will have disastrous consequences in terms of extreme weather, lightning strikes, volcanic activity and earthquakes. The UK’s mobile phone emergency alert system has got nothing to do with war! The present grand solar maximum lasting the last 100 years has been ridden on by the elite as evidence of global warming as it fits nicely with increasing CO2 emissions, despite humans only being responsible for about 3% of global CO2 emissions (The rest are natural) and the fact that CO2 levels rise and fall in response to global temperatures not the other way round. The big fiery ball in the sky controls global temperatures and in turn CO2 levels which at 420 ppm are at historic lows and for the majority of earth’s history have been around 5,000 ppm. However, Mr Global has indoctrinated people into the anthropogenic climate change ruse in order to take total control over the population as the carrying capacity of the earth plummets over the middle part of the century. The absolute Zero UK Fires report done for the government is not about net zero but in fact details what will happen out of necessity as a result of this catastrophe. There is also evidence that this cycle culminates with a solar micronova which unlocks the crust from the mantle causing the earth to flip 90 degrees as the ice caps settle out on the equator. Humanity always survives these events but civilisations will not. Call it The Great Reset if you will. See more at Suspicious Observers on YouTube.
It’s about sensationalism, ideology and click-bait, leading to more jobs and money in the climate-change industry.