The recent cancellation of Alimonti et al shows clearly that catastrophising bad weather events and attributing them to a collapse of the climate is now the main weapon deployed to scare populations into embracing the Net Zero agenda. Of course, reference is still made to global warming, but most recent rises seem to owe more to frequent upward retrospective adjustments of temperature, rather than any significant natural boost. Perhaps we should not be surprised by this turn of events. In a short essay titled ‘The New Apocalypticism’, the science writer Roger Pielke Jr. noted: “For the secular millenarian, extreme events – floods, hurricanes, fires – are more than mere portents, they are evidence of our sins of the past and provide opportunities for redemption in the future, if only we listen, accept and change.”
The climate is collapsing all around us, shout the headlines – they require we ignore the data, the historical record, even common sense. When all is said and done, the Earth is not actually boiling! Well Professor Gianluca Alimonti and three other Italian scientists didn’t ignore the past data, much of it in fact from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they found little change in extreme weather events. They published a paper concluding that there was certainly not enough to justify the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’. A year later, the publisher Springer Nature bowed to the demands of a group of activist scientists and journalists led by the Guardian and Agence France-Presse and retracted the non-conforming paper. An addendum was proposed and sent to four reviewers for comment. Three reviewers argued for publication. The fourth stated that typical readers were not climate experts and “editors should seriously consider the implications of the possible publication of this addendum”.
We own climate science, boasted UN communications flak Melissa Fleming at a recent World Economic Forum disinformation seminar, and we partner with Google to keep our version at the top of the search list. What a great service these climate experts provide in telling us what to think and see as we unsophisticated rubes struggle towards the path of true enlightenment!
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said we are on a pathway to climate hell, with our foot on the accelerator. Steve Koonin, President Obama’s Energy Under-Secretary for Science and the author of Unsettled, recently charged that climate scientists were negligent for not speaking out and saying Guterres’s comments were “preposterous”. Koonin is not very impressed with mainstream media click bait weather stories. “I can take current media and almost any climate story I can write a very effective counter,” he recently told Peter Robinson, host of Uncommon Knowledge. “It is like shooting fish in a barrel.”
The mainstream media has an agenda to set, namely the de-carbonisation of society. Noting the influence of green billionaire-funded operations like Covering Climate Now, Koonin said the mission was to promote the narrative. The MSM will not allow anything to be broadcast or written that is counter to the narrative. And the narrative is: “We have already broken the climate and we are heading for hell.”
You just need to look out of the window, claim the politicised alarmists. These days any half-decent storm, or scorchio summer’s day, gets them going. This year some unusual weather patterns are put forward as Exhibit A for Thermogeddon. Such deception depends upon the rubes failing to spot the difference between weather and long-term climate trends. Nobody should ask why carbon dioxide has been up to 20 times higher in the atmosphere in the past and life on Earth thrived. CO2 might gently warm the atmosphere up to a certain point, but temperatures naturally go up and down, ocean currents get warmer and cooler, change direction and melt and freeze polar ice. The idea that single events can be linked to any long term effects of CO2 is not just unproven, it’s unprovable. Computer models that ‘attribute’ single events to 30-year trends are laughable pseudoscience.
That wise sage Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, who’s spent decades trying to figure out how the atmosphere works, summed up all this fraud and corruption:
What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.
For the distinguished climatologist Dr. Judith Curry, the Alimonti affair is “why I no longer publish in peer-reviewed papers”. She described the behaviour of the journal editors as “reprehensible” in retracting a widely read climate paper just because it contained “politically inconvenient conclusions”. She is right of course – the Alimonti affair is another shocking scientific scandal that casts further doubt on the climate science peer-review process. But then, Dr. Curry is merely a scientist in all this – she doesn’t own the science.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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