A major rewriting of the science published on Wikipedia that is sceptical of the ‘settled’ climate narrative is being funded by a number of Governments from Scandinavia and the U.K. The operation is being directed by the green activist group, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), under a project titled ‘Improving communication of climate knowledge through Wikipedia’.
The operation targets climate change pages that have significant daily page views. The SEI notes that Wikipedia articles usually appear at the top of internet search results, and the site plays a “key role” in helping promote climate change knowledge. “The improvement of the key articles making use of available scientific expertise is necessary,” it says.
The key word of course is “improvement” but, alas, a brief list of the “content experts” does not inspire confidence that rigorous dissemination of all climate science views will prevail. For instance, Kristie L. Ebi from the University of Washington has the curious notion that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are “affecting the nutritional quality of our food”. Poor old CO2 you might feel. It gets a shocking press these days but few doubt its role as the gas of life, whose 60% reduction in the atmosphere would lead to the swift removal of all plant and life forms on Earth.
Elizabeth Gilmore of Carleton University, another of SEI’s “content experts”, runs a class on inspiring young eco-activists. She recently wrote that after Greta Thunberg “admonished” delegates at COP24, “it has become increasingly apparent that university students feel the brunt of multiple and interlinked existential crises of climate change, biodiversity, persistent inequality, inequity and economic precarity”.
The SEI project includes academics who have “scientific and climate change expertise”. In fact the ‘expertise’ seems to tend towards the burgeoning world of eco bureaucracy, consultancy and green activism. All the parties collaborate by revising and cutting text, proposing new content and adding new references. There is also interaction with published experts, “who advise us on necessary content edits”.
The Stockholm Environment Institute was founded in 1989 by the Swedish government to “support decision-making and induce changes towards sustainable development around the world”. It claims to provide this by supplying knowledge that bridges science and policy in the field of environmentalism and development. Its green activism is well supported by governments and many interested parties including Left-wing billionaire foundations. According to figures publicly revealed, it received over £11 million in 2020 from Swedish government interests, and £1.5 million from Norway. The British government even supplied £326,000 of funding it says in its 2022 report.
SEI is closely connected with the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its Chairman, appointed by the Swedish government, is Lennart Bage, the former Co-Chair of the U.N. Green Climate Fund (GCF) that aims to raise $100 billion a year to pay for green boondoggles in the developing world. Signing off his chairmanship of the GCF in 2019, Bage noted that “we have moved from millions to billions but we need to move to trillions”. Some of the content experts for the Wikipedia re-education programme come from the U.N., the IPCC and the Conference of the Parties (COP).
Recently, the U.N. Under-Secretary for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, told delegates at a World Economic Forum ‘disinformation’ seminar that her organisation had partnered with Google to ensure only U.N.-approved climate search results appear at the top. In chilling tones, she explained: “We are becoming more proactive, we own the science and the world should know it.” In the context of this remark, the disclosure that a concerted attempt is being made to propagandise Wiki pages is unsurprising. Across all media, collectivist-minded operations funded by a wide variety of sources including governments, NGOs, foundations and wealthy individuals are rewriting the climate narrative with the help of mainstream media to suit a drive to Net Zero and economic and societal change. Advertising boycott campaigns face any individual media operation that steps out of line, academic careers are held back, fatuous ‘fact-check’ attacks are launched, school text books are rewritten and massive green scare campaigns are launched on an almost daily basis.
What is truly depressing is that the Conservative Party is often to be found at the front of the queue when it comes to handing out taxpayer cash to fund climate and woke campaigns. Providing money to alter Wiki pages is just the latest misuse of taxpayers’ hard earned money. In February, the Daily Sceptic reported that the British Foreign Office was helping to fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which was circulating a ‘blocklist’ of conservative publications including the American Spectator and the New York Post.
As we noted at the time, one of the reasons the GDI posed such a threat to free speech was that its definition of ‘disinformation’ is unusually capacious. It doesn’t just mean information that is false and dissemination by people knowing it’s false. It has broadened the definition to include what it calls “adversarial narratives”.
Just weep for the death of science – “adversarial narratives” no longer required.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Excellent, Guy.
(btw, I always liked your contributions to Time Team – a programme I don’t think I ever missed an episode of).
Oh it’s THAT Guy?!
I’m a fan. <3
Maybe he shaved with Hanlon’s razor in preparation for his address? Lovely piece thank you!
“Indeed, David Attenborough has already expressed his wish that aspects of the lockdown become permanent, like working from home”.
Thank goodness he did not follow that path all his working life! It would have been hard to make all those wonderful wildlife programs in his living room.
I mean, fair enough, maybe people should be given the option of working from home if they want to. The OPTION. Not the enforced norm.
Exactly it shouldn’t be forced. All of this “new normal” is chilling.
David Attenborough is the man who has stated several times that the world population must be reduced to 500 Million to save the planet.
Nice man.
Let us all encourage him to set an example by going to Dignitas, now that Matt Hancock says it is OK to do so.
There is some excellent research, over sixty years old, which predicts how people will continue to believe in ideas and ideologies even when they are incontravertibly disproven: https://www.hughwillbourn.com/post/cc-no-2-covid-brexit-and-flying-saucers
“In the other lies some sort of chance to learn to live with the virus crisis and use self-determination to overcome it within the context of all the other challenges we face.”
Yep, just like we do with the flu while so many go about spreading the virus over the winter months with probably no thought about the thousands who die from it.
RIGHT?!?!
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s visionary politicians carefully constructed a lower middle class, to tackle the exponential need for clerks, as industry overlook agriculture. They were cleverly imbued with a total lack of leadership, and injected with a fear of losing status, and a non- financial work ethic, and an obsession with what the neighbours thought. They were not designed to run the country, nor become its largest socio demographic group…..
Great article!
Question on Line 1, with its accurate observation that “All states progress towards totalitarianism.” That being so, why do anything less than work for the abolition of the state?
Excellent article Guy – but deeply sad and worrying that such a thing needs to be written at all! The supine population of the UK, content to wallow at home drinking and occasionally lumbering to the door (their non-supine moment :)) to clap the NHS, mostly reacts not one jot to the assault on its freedoms, the rise of the police state, the power grab by the politicians and the dissembling of various medical scientists. What the hell does the future hold?
Exactly when will people wake up to what’s going on?!?!
“Mendicant friars”! Love it Guy.
As a German, although far too young to have experienced it myself, I welcome you calling it Reich and comparing strategies and propaganda. Funny, the British are so obsessed with How Hitler came to power, just yesterday there was yet another program on BBC4, so how come they do not recognise the signs?
Exactly
I thought he fell short in his appraisal of how Germany became a totalitarian state as a result of the Great War. Wrong. It was the (calculated) result of the imposition of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, which conditions were designed specifically to crush Germany to the point where the populace would be prone to unite under a charismatic leader – thus creating WWII – also a calculated specific outcome, and which outcome created the conditions for a post-war “youth movement” and the whole “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” philosophy of the 60’s and beyond, which helped with tipping the balance away from the Christian base of the culture and making personal gratification the basis; along with Feminism to destroy the relationship between men and women, to destroy the family, to destroy the role of men i n in society. All this “gender fluidity” is the direct, calculated, outcome of all that. People who have no idea who they are, or what their responsibilities as created beings are, or what their obligations to others and the greater society are, can have the angst and anger and despair created in them, through the loss of connection to their true selves, exploited and used to forward the totalitarian agenda …….
Do we have a disciple of Lyndon LaRouche on our hands here?
ABSOLUTELY TRUE GUY. LITTLE LEFTY LUVVIE WORKING AT MY LOCAL ASDA TRIED TO TELL ME I HAD TO WEAR A MASK TO ENTER THE STORE. TOLD HER SHE WAS JUST LIKE THE BLOODY GESTAPO, SHE TRIED THE OLD WATERWORKS AND SAID SHE WAS JUST TRYING TO SUPPORT HER CHILDREN THROUGH PANDEMIC. HA VERY LIKELY SHEEP, NICE TRY BUT BRITAIN IS NOT A FASCIST COMMUNIST STATE JUST YET
OK actually I do think you were an asshole there. She’s not the one who makes the rules it’s our government. Totalitarian control what’s going on and you should be fighting the government on it (I’ll gladly join you) not taking it out on a mother. And to actually make her cry it’s not her fault the government has taken everyone’s rights away!
Noone is going to see what is going on until its too late! It’s scary seeing how people’s rights have eroded and freedoms taken away for a virus with a 99.7% survival rate