There has been another sighting of the regular complaint that climate scientists are being subject to hurty comments on Twitter. The Guardian reports a “huge” rise in abuse since Elon Musk took over the platform last year. “It’s mostly just people saying you are talking rubbish,” admits Professor Richard Betts from the Met Office, although the Guardian headlines its story with a “vicious abuse” charge. This would appear to be the same Guardian that apologised in 2019 for saying David Cameron felt only “privileged pain” upon the death of his handicapped young son. The same newspaper that recently published George Monbiot’s belief that “taking out” pipelines, refineries, abattoirs, coal plants and SUVs is “morally justified“, and the same publication that has taken to printing racist cartoons aimed at its political opponents that would not have looked out of place in a Third Reich newspaper.
The Guardian reports that some of the U.K.’s top scientists are struggling to deal with this rise in abuse from “climate deniers”. They are fighting to make themselves heard over what is described as a “barrage of hostile comments”. Twitter employees who ensured ‘trusted’ content was prioritised have been sacked, while Right-wing culture warriors such as Jordan Peterson have been reinstated. The newspaper cites a recent survey from Global Witness which suggested prominent scientists were the most likely to face abuse.
One of those prominent scientists is UCL Geography Professor Mark Maslin, who received an ‘abusive’ tweet that referred to “a fairy tale about the big bad weather”. Another correspondent replied: “Great stories about BS science Mark. But I am tired of sci-fi.” Dr. Helen Muri, a Norwegian researcher, was sent a graph of Greenland ice core temperatures over the last 10,000 years suggesting current temperatures were at an all-time low. The writer asked in polite terms, “Any luck finding the climate crisis yet?”
Of course there is abuse across social media, some of it not very pleasant. Nobody condones threats of violence, or indeed support for violent acts, and it should be removed from public discourse. But anyone who takes an inquiring view on the current mainstream narrative on issues such as climate change and Covid gets enormous amounts of abuse on a daily basis. Slightly less concern seems to be in evidence for all the hurty feelings this may be causing us (not that it is something that really fusses us).
What is happening of course is that the horrors of the collectivist Net Zero project are becoming increasingly apparent, as a widespread attack on almost all human activity is launched under the suggestion that the climate is breaking down. Until recently the ‘settled’ science promoting this view had a safe, largely uncontested space to prosper. But scepticism about the unproven hypothesis that humans operate the climate thermostat by burning fossil fuels is growing, with two recent polls showing that over 40% of people surveyed worldwide believe climate change is mainly due to natural causes. Far from coughing up the huge sums required to hit Net Zero, 4 in 10 Americans are not even prepared to pay more than two dimes a week to combat climate change.
Professor Maslin has noted an “uptick in stupid comments” when he says something “very logical” such as “if we all eat a lot less meat, we’ll live a lot longer and be healthier”. As regular readers will recall, Maslin believes that climate change politics helps build “a new political (and socio economic) system”. It is hardly surprising that the banning of meat eating, along with all the other notable Net Zero suggestions such as no flying, shipping, barely enough energy to heat homes and cook food and restrictions on all common building materials, is starting to foster wide debate – even sometimes robust debate. Maslin, along with many of his fellow climate extremists, seem oblivious to this gathering trend. This is perhaps not surprising. In 2018, he was one of a number of eco-activists who signed a letter to the Guardian saying they would no longer “lend their credibility” by debating climate change scepticism.
The loss of Twitter as a ‘safe’ space for climate alarmists has been a bitter blow. It is not seemingly enough to exert considerable control over most other public platforms including social and mainstream media. Global Witness is of the view that if climate scientists are unable to do their work because of “stress and fear caused by harassment”, the critical evidence that undergirds climate action and solutions is put at risk. For his part, Maslin seems particularly disappointed, since he discloses that he held regular meetings with the platform’s Head of Sustainability to ensure ‘trusted’ information was pushed to the top. But the sustainability chief was sacked and Twitter “became the Wild West”, he laments.
It is reasonable for social media users to tell delicate activists like Maslin that there is really nothing to worry about from our climate. It’s just free speech, and it applies – in fact it is vital – in science and geography, as elsewhere. But it’s not just about science anymore. It is becoming apparent that Net Zero is being used as an attack on almost all human activity. Everything humans do to survive, from keeping warm to growing food, is being cast as an attack on Mother Earth.
In his Guardian article backing eco-saboteurs “who have acted with courage”, George Monbiot argues that if we take out the obvious targets, “we are still committed to extinction”. He finds that the case for a campaign of violent attacks on the industrial economy is “compelling”. In his view, the struggle is not just with fossil capital and the governments that support it. “We are fighting against all capital and, perhaps, most of the people it employs”, he explains.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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They are not just loons…..they are EVIL dangerous (FACT free) loons.
Oh god im tearing
up here!
Facts don’t give an f about your feelings, di#kheads!
Well done for making the Guardian’s point for them.
Just to clarify, I implied that the facts show there is no climate emergency!
One minor observation, Chris: even without Google’s giant evil thumb on the scales, every time you link to the Grauniad, you add to its “authority” on Google and other search engines, link-popularity being a key metric in how search engines rank their results.
I suspect that the Grauniad’s strategy for publishing click-bait, attention-seeking rubbish has been very successful in that regard.
Do people really search with Google still? In which case, more fool them.
“on Google and other search engines“
Geddit?
What I don’t understand about climate activists and their kin is the self flagellation? Can’t they see they are destroying their own and their family’s wellbeing and lifestyle? If that’s what they want, then why don’t they lead by example? Give up their cars, their centrally heated homes, their foreign holidays. How will they fight climate denialism stuck in a bedsit in Tooting without fossil fuels enabling them to get to all those Just Stop Oil protests? They are cutting off their nose to spite their face. But they are too stupid to see that of course. And too blind and stubborn to be bothered to debate the science because ‘97% of scientists’ agree there is a climate crisis. Aggh!
The “activists” are often trust fund, ex-public school am-dram types. They have plenty of money, what they crave is attention.
They’ve been brainwashed into a cult so are blind to the harms of the ‘solutions’.
Those spreading alarm about the climate have been getting away with calling anyone who dares question any aspect of this issue as “climate deniers” for years. ——-You don’t get much more offensive than that, given that this term came from comparing those sceptical of anything to do with this issue to holocaust deniers. A more infantile piece of name calling is hard to find from people who sit in their little castles on top of the moral high ground, and who wonder why they get no respect from people who want to find the truth on climate change rather than the “official truth”. In science you question everything, otherwise you are not dealing in science. Science is not decided by a show of hands from government funded data adjusters and climate modellers who insist on calling their models “science”.————But this issue is not a black and white one. It is not the case that there either is “climate change” or there isn’t “climate change”. It is also a moral, social and economic issue as well as being very highly politicised, and the whole political agenda of Sustainable Development depends on their being dangerous climate change otherwise that whole agenda collapses. Is it any surprise that the Climate Industrial Complex and the Eco Socialists hate anyone disagreeing with them or challenging their “official science”. ——-Or as Mrs. Thatcher pointed out “Socialists don’t like you choosing for you might not choose socialism”.
I judge the impact of climate change on simple observations of natural occurrences. One beautiful metric is the date of flowering of wisteria and the fading of the blooms. For decades it has passed its peak by May15th. This year it is just reaching its full glory now.
Add to this the unfamiliar gardening tasks this year of removing mature plants that have been killed by the cold this winter, including the olive tree planted 10years ago on the (false) promise of a Mediterranean climate in Britain, a massive phormium (New Zealand flax), an acer and numerous flowering shrubs such as ceanothus.
I find this actual evidence considerably more painful that hurty words.
I’ve been keeping a nature diary since Jan 2011 and see no evidence of warming.
The cold spell last winter killed a hebe and a fuchsia that were planted at least 5 years before 2011.
Is that Yorkshire where you suffer winds off Siberia (I was brought up in Norfolk)? I am now in balmy (note L not R) N Cheshire.
Northants side of the Northants/Rutland border.
(I grew up in Ossett but changed my name from Ossettian to Nearhorburian after thickos kept accusing me of being Russian!)
I changed my name especially to bait the same group.
But the BBC News headline today: “World likely to breach 1.5C climate threshold”, so your garden is safe. The BBC doesn’t report that Macron is poised to ditch NetZero and presumably XR, presumably because NetZero Carbon now means NetZero Votes.
“World breaches 1.5c. Edinburgh now as hot as Manchester, read all about it”
You’ll still need a coat…
It might not have been the cold what done it! Lack of carbon in the atmosphere, all these windmills and solar panels ,don’t you know! Lowering levels of the very gas plants thrive on!
You must be mistaken. The models say that all your plants are thriving.
Yes. The un-calibrated models crammed with functions that are not based on observation or evidence are the only places where warming actually exists. If the professtitutes who wrote them had any credibility they would show the results of running several decades of data through them and pointing to the accuracy of the models arriving at the same data we can observe today. Wonder why they don’t do that ? Funny isn’t it ! Its the way proper scientists validate proper models.
“would show the results of running several decades of data through them and pointing to the accuracy of the models arriving at the same data”
That’s more like it. The late flowering of geraniums one year to the next is hardly evidence of changes in climate. Several decades worth might suggests blips. A couple of centuries might point to bigger blips. The rest is just scamming for money.
Models, eh? “Researchers have estimated that decades of burning leaded gasoline caused millions of premature deaths, enormous declines in IQ levels[ …]”. Presumably, according to models, following the banning of lead in petrol there has been a massive drop in premature deaths and an enormous recovery in IQ levels. If the models don’t show that, it will be simple to bolt on another “von Neumann elephant” parameter called “Long Lead” to produce the required output. It worked for Acid Rain, Ozone Depletion and Covid, and will doubtless return for Climate Emergency.
In the Good Old Days of Science, all that was needed to convert Newtonian Mechanics into Quantum Mechanics was to add one parameter (Planck’s Constant) and tune it to match reality and show that winding it back to zero recovered Newtonian Mechanics. When computer modelling met climate science the scientists simply added a new parameter every time some “scenario” failed to materialise, rather like the way end-of-the-world cultists keep recalculating the date.
I am baffled by your reporting of seasonal changes as somehow relating to the nonsense of “climate change.”
Back in the days of Peak Climate Change (2010) seasonal change in blossoming was regarded as cogent evidence of “Climate Change”. Even the way that Japanese cherry blossom occurred one day earlier than the previous year was noted by Nobuyuki Asada in his report on why our children are not going to know what cherry blossom is . It all seems so quaint a decade late. I guess that the scare was sufficient to keep the research grants coming in and fossil fuels going out.
You need to remember that climate does not tick along in some kind of straight line on a graph. There is a natural variability of climate. Your wisteria does not flower at 2 pm on the 8th of May every year for centuries, and its failure to flower at 2 pm on the 8th of May is evidence only of natural variability. ——Even the IPCC admit they cannot tell the difference between natural variability of the climate and changes allegedly caused by our CO2 emissions.
UN Poll from some yeas ago. Over 17 million respondents. It speaks for itself
As does this…
And this… they can’t even be bothered to pretend any more, and this is from a few years back.
Zero tolerance.
The BBCs weatherman Thomas ShatterKnacker (I may have misspelled this) had to write an excusatory piece in the Mail this weekend about why the spring was so wet, ‘just like the 70s or 80s’.
Meanwhile, yet another year in the ever lengthenjng series without their beloved warming.
Has he done any topless photoshoots recently?
It really pisses them off when they are forced to hear what people actually think about climate change.
NetZero isn’t working as a scare to replace Covid: it sounds too close to the old Climate Change and has connotations of zero heating and zero transport. The new Mencken Hobgoblin is AI. Doubtless there will be proposals to make chatbots “feel safe” by banning criticism or ridicule of their output, or to limit what material they may be trained on, lest their “feelings” be hurt. Watch this space and keep up at the back!
An acquaintance has suggested that the fear being stoked about the dangers of AI is a precursor to the introduction of a ‘solution’ to prove that you’re human such as a biometric ID… The fear is being stoked by none other than Billy Gates, such a kind, caring philanthropist….
I continue to wait, apparently in vain, for all the people saying the earth is overpopulated, to leave of their own accord.
In particular, if George Monbiot could possibly become extinct, I would happily raise a glass to his memory.
If you grow up thinking that in some sense intellect supersedes all other abilities and deficiencies then you end up in a culture like our own. I am all for a love of the mind but we are talking here about a very narrow bandwidth and we seem to have imposed this on ourselves to our detriment. Surely examples like these point us in a certain direction.From a philosophical or literary perspective, sixty years ago such individuals would be seen as fools, but dangerous fools by the perceptive. If the West is to survive at all it needs to take a grasp of its fundaments. The rest is just distracton and nonsense.
People ask if there is a Cabal. There is a Caba,l the University of Zurich conducted a stidy and they identified a structure that they called the network of corporate control. It controls about fifty percent of the world economy and has a centralized structure. Iti s very inportant to have an overview of the situation in tumultuous times.
Look up. Chem trails being spread every single day in the UK. Weather manipulation, sun dimming and god only knows what else is being sprayed across the skies.who has ordered this chemical spraying, who fly the aircraft performing the spraying, what aircraft are being used, and finally what in the hell is being sprayed? Why don’t the public know about this? Devon had sudden downpours causing floods in a few towns two weeks ago. Yesterday Italy suffered the same. Hurricane Ian devastated the west coast of Florida in the past year and on and on and on.
We can all see where this is going, can’t we? More censorship of genuine criticism. If they didn’t spout such BS, they wouldn’t receive these comments. When are they going to grow up and deal with the facts that contradict their loony predictions?
If the climate armagedon lot are sure of their facts and data then they’d be happy to talk about it. The fact that they feel that they are being held to account and have to justify themselves is because, at heart, they know they are wrong.