Marco Silva is taking time out from his role as a senior reporter for BBC Verify specialising in ‘climate disinformation’ to enrol on a six-month course at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), a green activist operation funded by billionaire foundations promoting the collectivist Net Zero project. Past direct funders of this course include the Laudes Foundation and the European Climate Fund, the latter heavily supported by Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. Also signed up for the course is Mora Morrison, a BBC World Service producer.
I guess the cat's out of the bag…
— Marco Silva
In January, I'll be joining the Oxford Climate Journalism NetworkSuper excited about it! https://t.co/yTLNmM00YE
The OCJN runs what is described as an intensive programme for about 100 journalists/activists around the world. Participants can expect to be immersed in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse, the so-called ‘settled science’ and the need for extreme Net Zero measures, whatever the economic and societal cost. A flavour of the echo-chamber discussions can be gleaned from past essays produced by ‘alumni’, which include titles such as ‘Journalists should help audiences understand extreme weather – even when they lack climate data’, ‘To report fully on climate change, journalists need to integrate indigenous knowledge into their coverage’, and ‘Newsrooms should develop a mental health strategy to help climate journalists cope’.
Marco Silva should enjoy his time confirming his climate science priors. He has a keen nose for what he calls ‘disinformation’, basing his work on what he deems to be the authority of 99.9% of scientists who say humans are primarily responsible for the current warming of the climate. This is provided as a reason for not hearing from the “other side”. The ongoing scientific process, alas, seems to play little part in the BBC’s Net Zero agitprop. Alas, again, Silva seems unaware that the 99.9% consensus claim that he holds to be true is the creative work of cream pie thrower and green activist Mark Lynas. This work was demolished recently in a paper led by the chemistry and physics professor Yonatan Dubi. He found that massive flaws and biases riddled Lynas’s work, implying the conclusions of the study do not follow from the data. In fact, looking at the data presented by Lynas, Dubi concludes that the actual number of scientists agreeing with human-caused warming may be on the “low side”. A previous 97% consensus claim has also been widely debunked, with former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author Professor Richard Tol saying that the climate community still has a long way to go in weeding out bad research and behaviour.
None of these issues need bother the hundreds of journalists now passing through the hands of the OCJN. Started last year, it is part of the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. The Reuters Institute is backed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and numerous green billionaire funders including the Laudes Foundation, the European Climate Foundation (backed by Sir Christopher Hohn’s Children’s Investment Fund Foundation) and the Knight Foundation. During 2022-23, funding of “over £1 million” was received from the Google News Initiative and Meta Journalism Project.
At the OCJN, the Advisory Board is dedicated to “improving the quality and impact of climate change journalism worldwide”. Again, careful curation is evident in its goal to “establish connections between the Network and leading organisations and ideas in the world of climate journalism, climate science and climate policy”. Members include OCJN co-founder Wolfgang Blau, who’s also an adviser to the United Nations Climate Change Division and a trustee of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation; Dr Fatima Denton, a co-ordinating author for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report; Aldine Furio, the Strategic Communications Director, Europe, at the European Climate Foundation; Leo Hickman, the Editor of Carbon Brief, an activist blog funded by the European Climate Foundation; Dr Radhika Khosla, contributing author to the IPCC; and Catrin Thomas, who helps the Laudes Foundation to “catalyse broad impacts through the development of external relations”.
Marco Silva claims that he is investigating and debunking bad information about global warming. “Not everything is what it seems,” he tells us. “Bad actors can be incredibly clever in the way they try to manipulate our knowledge and perception of climate change. Don’t rush, take your time to dig deeper, and dare to ask: why is this narrative being shared? Where does it come from? Who stands to benefit from it?”
Perhaps he might care to put those last three questions to the well-funded organisers of his sabbatical over the next six months.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Someone needs to be carefully filing all this information away for future reference, when the Renewable Net Zero finally crashes and burns (together with the economy of the gormless West.)
What a bunch of stupid cults.
Perhaps you don’t remember the Cold War. Many in the west excuses the Communists bad actions and worse intent, they often gave support for an example of softer Communism which was not on offer and denied outright the shocking violence within the USSR.
when the USSR collapsed its principal supporters and apologists failed to apologise for their past and retracted nothing. Some of them have buried themselves in our institutions seemingly to pursue their first love surreptitiously.
so with Net Zero. As the wheels come off their weak case there will be no accountability. The political class never accepts its faults and errors. So with every public policy failure, of which there seems to be an unending stream.
our priority must be to break Uniparty snd destroying the Conservative Party brand would be a good start, indeed it is the necessary first step. .
Show me a party that stands unapologetically and unambiguously for shrinking the gargantuan, out of control state bureaucracy down to the bare bones and I’m there.
Everything else is tinkering around the edges.
Millei in Argentina is sadly not going to be on our ballots.
Isn’t shrinking government and cutting the useless civil serpent class ‘fascist’ ? Doesn’t that make us Hitler (again) ?
Is there a more obvious example of why the Fake News is just Fake News propaganda?
£500 mn or even a billion handed out to the fake news during the Rona scamdemic for the 24-7 fear porn. Same will be true of the climate bollocks.
Pretend journalists who are eco-activists, trained by the cult chasing a $1 Trillion p.a. market, being given the propaganda to turn on the hoi polloi, and will never disclose their conflict of interests or the payments to their fake news orgs by the climate cult and its billionaires.
Journos and ‘scientists’ have the credibility of dog manure. When I run I avoid said manure. When I think I avoid said manure.
You probably already realise that many of your friends and family fall for this. You will hear them say things like “Well when I was young we always used to get snow, and now we don’t”. or “The climate is definitely changing” as if somehow they can see climate change from their living room window over the last 40 years. The problem is that every bit of extreme weather anywhere in the world is now beamed 24 hours a day into peoples home via satellite TV and this might give the impression that everything is getting worse. But that is all it is —–an impression.
The Climate Industrial Complex is attempting to impose TRUTH. But science is not a dictatorship. The highest calling in science is scepticism, and blind faith the one unpardonable sin. When truth is declared by some authority it reveals only one thing ……..We are not dealing in science. We are dealing with a theory full of questionable assumptions that has been adopted for political purposes. The idea that something is “extremely likely” in reference to some increase in temperatures is NOT science. ——-Listen to this from the IPCC. “The increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century in the last 1000 years”———They declare that a nearly 1 C rise is abnormal. But 1000 years ago there was a similar warming (MWP) and similar other warmings (Roman) and (Minoan) in the last several 2 thousand years. But OfCourse this 1 C rise could not all have been caused by humans as we were not emitting much in the way of CO2 prior to 1950. So half of this “abnormal rise” was not even caused by us. ——Then ofcourse we have all manner of catastrophes that are declared to be going to occur as a result of this little alleged rise in temperature. –Floods, droughts, disease, famine, crop failure, climate refugees, storms, heat waves, and extinctions. —–Notice we never hear of any advantages of a slight temperature rise. It is all BAD. But all species do better when it is warmer, not colder. —-We can be sure that this “Climate Course” the BBC guy is going on will NEVER mention any climate benefit from a slightly warmer temperature because that would be “Disinformation” in Climatism world.
I wonder if he will get a test and certificate at the end f his brain washing?
A Communist Red Star and badge perhaps. ‘Hero of the Climate Wars’.
He will pass his Climate Indoctrination exam with Merit, as he has already been well manipulated while at the BBC.
My impression of Soviet Russia was that everyone knew the state was lying to them all the time. Even those charged with spreading the lies knew they were lies, and understood theirs was just a role in the game. Perhaps there is someone who lived in Soviet Russia who could corroborate this.
People like Marco Silva comes across as being so stupid that he believes the crap he spews.
Does he even have an inkling that he’s going to an indoctrination camp? Probably not. He’s probably too giddy about the boost he thinks his career is going to get.
In any case, just as people start waking up to the Net Zero scam they’re also going to have to wake up to the extent to which we have all been ambushed. We’re completely surrounded. Every nook an cranny of society had been infiltrated and taken over by the climatists.
We have one hell of a fight ahead. Covid was nothing compared to this.
I just finished re-watching the excellent 2019 mini-series Chernobyl, Stewart, and this is exactly how the Soviet state functioned. Even when they knew that the fault lay in the Soviet design and engineering of the RBMK reactors, they could not admit it for doing so was to assert that Soviet nuclear reactors were dangerous ticking nuclear timebombs, something that could never be admitted. The authorities finally got around to retrofitting the remaining RBMK reactors, all of which would have had the same potential to explode in certain conditions, several years after the Chernobyl event. This was nothing more than state-sanctioned lying and I see obvious parallels with this crap course in how to lie and convince people of these lies.
“Official Science”.or “State Approved Science” is unfortunately NOT science. So “”follow the science” does not apply and “All scientists agree” is propaganda not science.
Er..yes, I know. What’s your point, varmint?
That was simply me agreeing with you. (as I quite often do) ———If you want to see “points” I make maybe you should read my large comment on this article.
…immers[ing] the prisoner in a small group of other prisoners who are as or more advanced in their reform than he…..the image of a zealous enthusiastic mass movement sweeping converts into its ranks by virtue of its intrinsic message and reliance on practical knowledge of interpersonal manipulation…It is the attempt to reform its enemies and prisoners – to cure the disease and save the man…this emphasis [is] on persuasion, rehabilitation and reform….
…brainwashing is a highly dangerous and possibly irresistible weapon against the mind of man.
Edgar H Schein, Coercive Persuasion, 1961
I wonder who is paying for him to attend the course and I assume salary, and Pension contributions will stop during the 6 months. As the Public excluding me funds the BBC, it is they who are paying for it all.
Yes, it’s interesting that, Hester. We are literally paying for someone to lie to us and tell us we are wrong.
Via the License fee we all pay in full for our own brainwashing.—–Race Gender Equality Diversity and Climate.
I don’t. I haven’t personally had a TV for over 15 years. I don’t listen to radio either.
Ok but you are certainly an exception.
Another biased BBC project that makes me suffer a painful cringe and and feel a shivering hurrrrgh!
Can these people really be that stupid? Indeed why do they even call themselves journalists? Surely a good journalist would want to investigate opposing claims to the mainstream. I mean really investigate such as interview the scientists, meteorologists etc – and there are an awful lot of them – who defy the narrative and get to the heart of the matter. But no, a course will suffice where they’ll be subject to the echo chamber effect and no doubt they’ll all come away shiny eyed with glittering career prospects as a result. Yes, I think they are stupid.
On the issue of climate, Investigative Journalism stopped long ago. There is only a handful who dare question any of it on TV. eg Julia Hartley Brewer, Mark Stein (till he got booted) elements of Fox and elements of GB news , but not Eamonn Holmes or Anne Diamond etc who are simply breakfast show tittle tattle presenters.
Its not a course it’s climate disinformation and propaganda training by the billionaire, woke socialist class. Despise them utterly and the disgusting BBC communists. Close them down. Destroy all the buildings, grind the remains to dust and salt the earth that they stood on.
The propagandists know no limits!
The woke “brigade” love to hate the imperialist colonisers of the past and demand reparations, but they are seeking to abuse and enslave us in a very similar way in their quest for power and influence and financial gains for the climate pioneers.
Who will pay reparations to us when we are all impoverished and our country is brought to its knees by the rush to Net Zero?
Facts don’t matter anymore when you have the ‘Humanity-caused Climate Change’ ideology and religion.
It’s a lucrative industry.