In my column in the Spectator this week I’ve taken to task Nick Cowern, a retired physics professor and climate consultant who has called for publishers of ‘climate disinformation’ to be sent to prison. Since the Daily Sceptic is often accused of publishing ‘climate disinformation’ – in reality, a euphemism for anything that challenges the prevailing climate orthodoxy – I feel quite strongly about this! As I say in the first paragraph, this may sound like a ludicrously over-the-top suggestion, but it would be complacent to think it won’t happen. At least four EU member states have made it a criminal offence to spread disinformation – Hungary, Lithuania, Malta and France – and others including Ireland are preparing to do the same. In the U.K., the Online Safety Bill will introduce a new false communications offence. But securing convictions for ‘climate deniers’ may not be as simple as Prof Cowern belives.
One of the problems with criminalising ‘climate disinformation’ is there’s no infallible authority the courts could rely on to determine whether a particular claim about something climate-related is true or false. Advocates of net zero and other measures designed to reduce carbon emissions often use the term ‘climate deniers’ to describe their opponents, thereby persuading themselves that proving them wrong would be easy. But even the most hardened sceptics wouldn’t dispute that average global temperatures have increased in the past 150 years. Rather, the argument is about the role of human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels, in global warming and how much impact changing our behaviour would have. We also dispute just how catastrophic rising global temperatures are, and are unimpressed by the hyperbole of the environmental lobby (‘global boiling’). In other words, proving us wrong isn’t as straightforward as pointing to temperature data.
I suppose the prosecution could summon distinguished climate scientists as expert witnesses, but then so could the defence – for instance Dr John Clauser, last year’s joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, who’s just signed a declaration stating there is no climate emergency. No doubt the would-be jailers would invoke the ‘97 per cent of scientists agree’ canard, but not only is that stat dubious, it’s also a non-sequitur. As Einstein said when 100 physicists published a book rubbishing his theory of relativity: “Why 100? If I was wrong, one would have been enough.”
Perhaps Exhibit A for the prosecution would be a ‘fact check’ by a reputable news organisation. Last year Reuters took issue with a piece by Chris Morrison in which he noted that Arctic sea ice was making a comeback and the coverage was well above a 2012 low point. This was said to be “misleading”, although the figures came from an official EU weather source. Reuters’ experts said that the sea ice was not recovering, pointing to a declining trend over a longer time period. One of them didn’t dispute the ice had recovered since 2012, but said it was a “wiggle” and should not be cited as evidence that “climate change isn’t real”, which Chris hadn’t claimed. Nevertheless, he was accused of “cherry-picking”, although the sea ice improvement continues to this day. Send him down m’lud.
Or maybe not. I doubt the evidence of an ‘independent fact-checker’ would be taken as gospel by a jury. A defence barrister could ask them during cross-examination why they never scrutinise the statements of climate alarmists like Greta Thunberg. Last week, she pulled out of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, claiming the sponsor, Baillie Gifford, “invests heavily in the fossil fuels industry”. But wasn’t that a tad ‘misleading’? A spokesman for Baillie Gifford says just 2% of its clients’ money is invested in companies with businesses related to fossil fuels. But assertions such as Greta’s, along with her pretence that western governments have done ‘nothing’ to tackle climate change, are never fact-checked.
Worth reading in full.
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‘climate deniers’. I reject the premise of the pejorative.
Apart from the disgusting attempt to compare anyone who questions any aspect of this issue to holocaust deniers it seems to imply that as well as “climate deniers” there are also “climate confirmers”. —–But there are no experts or scientists or modellers or bureaucrats or activists or Attenborough’s or Thunberg’s who know what the climate is going to do 20 or 50 or 100 years from now. —–So there are no “confirmers”, and if there are no “confirmers”, then there is nothing for “deniers” to deny.
The evidence that the left is reverting to totalitarian type just keeps flowing in. “It’ll be different, this time,” they lisp, before trying to ban political parties (the AfD), blacking out “problematic” news stories and criminalising thought. Now they want to clap a chap in jug for holding an opinion. So where’s the difference, exactly? Well, they haven’t set up the gulag yet, but with prisoners of conscience they would take the first, fatal steps.
Farage is now talking openly of the need for a political revolution and he is right to do so – something along the lines of Prague, 1989. The political class, whether from cowardice, opportunism, true belief or sheer complacency (how typical of our establishment!) is overseeing the reintroduction of tyranny. The one gleam of hope amid this darkening mess is that the public is waking up and finding its voice, correctly identifying the enemy as hard left and willing to find ways and means of defeating them.
And Mr Young, here, can congratulate himself on making an indispensable contribution to that process.
“The one gleam of hope amid this darkening mess is that the public is waking up and finding its voice, correctly identifying the enemy as hard left and willing to find ways and means of defeating them”.
Not if the results of the last three by-elections are anything to go by!
Nobody, their facts are delvered, fully created, by organisations like the UN
Courtesy of Reuters and the Asscociated Press.. now.. I wonder who owns those two agencies ????
What hubris to think that we ever left the Medieval Ages with its suspicious, witch-obsessed, dogmatic mindset just because we have smartphones and the internet. Did the world get any smarter, any more self-aware after we invented all these things and more? NO, of course not. The same shysters get into power, the same hucksters want to stifle speech they don’t agree with, the same bitter, twisted souls who seek the light only to cast us into the darkness are all there, just dressed differently with smarter haircuts, reeking of peach-scented soap and wearing silk nooses around their necks. Religion is now called ‘The Science’ – I swear there’s a book of fiction somewhere about that. ‘Thou cannot and wilst not disagree with The Science, for to do so is blasphemy. Remember, there is no truth but OUR truth.’
This is very true. Flawed human nature with its contrary impulses and lurid fears does not change and needs profound tranquillity in order to reach the higher realms of logic and objectivity. This is what progressives forget: that the foundation of rationality is peace; and peace arises from a perfectly undisturbed status quo.
The whole idea of a “fact checker” is nonsense.
Exactly. It’s not fact-checking but pure censorship. In days of yore there used to be such a thing as scientific debate but it looks like that’s gone the way of the dodo.
The whole idea of a “fact checker” is….a bloody insult.
What worries me is that I think if you asked a lot of people about “fact checkers” they would think it was a good idea and put faith in them. Which is of course why we are where we are. I’m talking about “educated” and “intelligent” people, not just thickos.
What we on here have defined as the intelligent stupid. Ninety-nine per cent of those I live amongst qualify as intelligent stupid and it is extremely depressing as well as wearing.
Likewise
Fact Checking the Hockey Stick was good though right? So I think what you mean is that fact checking by people trying to protect dogma is a bloody insult. —-But unbiased fact checking isn’t. Everything needs to be fact checked. The whole idea of science is that the work of scientists be made available so others can check it. ——On the Hockey Stick Graph (as you will be well aware) data, code and methodology were not made available for others to check and only dogged determination by statistician Steve McIntyre exposed it as incorrect (and that is me being polite).
From the moment the US went for Assange with all its force and power, journalists for the most part have acquiesced to the establishment and know they are not to question authority. Not on any if the big stuff anyway.
So most of them probably welcome some fact checking authority to tell them where the red lines are.
Keeping themselves out of trouble is no doubt far more important to them than anything as mundane as the truth.
I think Paul Craig Roberts coined the term Presstitutes.. and how very apt that is..
“…there’s no infallible authority the courts could rely on to determine whether a particular claim about something climate-related is true or false.”
You are still living in the past.
Since Covid, the West’s judiciary has fully adopted the ‘only government&co data and conclusion is true and admissible in court’ approach.
I have to agree JayBee.
The demand for mere imprisonment of “deniers” is a walk-back for the alarmists. Back in 2012 Richard Parncutt (professor of systematic musicology at Karl Franzens University Graz in Austria) was calling for capital punishment for deniers (and some other targets).
Well, at least in the dock you could ask to boil a kettle to demonstrate the nature of boiling.
The judge and jury would swear they saw the water boiling at 30 centigrade
Undoubtedly.
As high as that ??? 😉
In previous times science was the big threat to authority. The likes of Copernicus and Galileo were thinking they were doing humanity a favour with their genuine search for truth but were seen as dangerous to the orthodoxy of the time. The authority of the church was being undermined. Galileo was given house arrest. —Wind forward to today and science is now king. There is a religious element to the science though, where those not subscribing to it or questioning it are seen as sinful heretics. The terminology is very religious—“climate apocalypse”, “Armageddon” etc and climate change supporters rely more on the will to believe and in faith and emotion rather than facts and reason. In many regards environmentalism, and in particular climate change has become a pseudo religious cult that tolerates no disbelievers. Or as Richard Lindzen puts it “Climate alarm belongs to a class of issues which makes claims for which there is no evidence and is characterised by profound immorality pretending to virtue”
Climate models can’t model regional climate behaviour beyond a couple of weeks let alone 100 years because the system they are modelling is mathematically chaotic. What reflects incoming solar energy? It’s clouds. They can’t model cloud behaviour so what makes them think they can model how solar insolation will evolve in 100 years time. Please find a fact checker who will contest that my statements are scientifically incorrect.
Additionally, I see on his Linkedin that Prof Cowern posits that reduction of SO2 is causing a faster rise in temperature and that 1.5 dec C may by reached by 2030. That would mean that CO2 has had a lesser impact than claimed as it’s usually all blamed on CO2.