An extraordinary story suggesting that male prostitutes in Indonesia self-identifying as ‘trans women’ are struggling to make a living due to climate change has been doing the rounds of mainstream media. The online Independent reported one sex worker complaining that “no one is coming out during the longer rainy season’, while another noted, “I no longer want to endure the heat and rain on the streets”. Needless to say, the actual data fail to give much credence to their weather woes. A lot of rain falls in tropical Indonesia but in the heaviest months of December, January and February during the period 1991-2020, the annual average of 833.6 mm was little changed from the 827.5 mm that fell 100 years ago. Over the entire period there has been an unnoticeable annual increase of 55 mm to 2,772.41 mm. Meanwhile the average annual temperature in Indonesia dropped by 0.14°C to 26°C from 2016 to 2022.
The U.K. blog Mumsnet ran a thread noting the Independent’s headline “How climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers”, and asked: “Is this the most ‘woke’ headline ever”? The first comment remarked: “I don’t think I’ve seen even Titania McGrath manage to get so much oppression into so few words.” The first comment under the Independent’s original story asked: ‘Is this a Babylon Bee article”?
In fact the game being played here is a serious one, as regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be only too well aware. The Independent story is credited to “Reuters correspondents” and is part of a global campaign to insert the fear of ‘climate change’ – human-caused of course – into almost every conceivable situation. The use of such emotional language is designed to drive up fear to support the Net Zero collectivisation. “Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and trans women, who tend to face more stigma and marginalisation than trans men or other LGBTQ+ Indonesians, are also among those hardest hit by extreme weather,” reports Reuters. It is appears that as well as seeking to adapt their “precarious livelihoods” to the new “climate reality”, attempts are also being made to “raise awareness” of the challenges posed by extreme weather.
Street walking in a Muslim-majority country undoubtedly has perils, but to use such a situation to blame the climate is ridiculous. As we have noted, the climate in Indonesia has been remarkably stable over the last century – a tad more warmth, and more or less the same amount of rain.
The above World Bank graph plots a five-year smoothed average temperature in Indonesia since the start of the last century. In common with other countries in the tropics, the warming has been around half that seen in the heavily urbanised lands further north. The average temperature in 2022 at 26°C was only 0.5°C higher than the 1922 recording of 25.5°C.
Looking at the aggregated accumulation precipitation data from the World Bank above shows little change going back over 100 years, and certainly nothing that would have been obvious to the local inhabitants. According to the Independent account, sex workers in the rainforest region of West Java “are among the most affected by extreme weather”, and there is no doubt rainfall is slightly higher at the 1,000 metre elevation. But light relief is also available since the average annual temperature is over 2°C cooler than the country as a whole.
Of course Reuters has considerable form when it comes to whipping up political fear of a changing climate. Over the last two years, the Reuters Institute has been running the Oxford Climate Journalism Network that has seen over 400 journalists from across the world take lengthy sabbaticals to be indoctrinated into the campaign to push a climate ‘emergency’ narrative into every imaginable story. Currently undergoing such education is Marco Silva from the BBC Verify unit. One past course speaker has speculated on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well-supported” science. Delegates are groomed to “move beyond their siloed past” as climate journalists into a strategic position within newsrooms, “combining expertise with collaboration”.
Billionaire funds also back Covering Climate Now, an operation run out of the Columbia Journalism Review in New York and supported by media operations including Reuters, the Guardian, Bloomberg and Agence France-Presse. It claims to feed over 500 media outlets with written stories and narratives. It seeks a “reframing” of the way poodle journalists cover climate change. In other words, the relentless amplification for obvious political and cultural purposes of an invented climate emergency by constant story catastrophisation of the climate.
In passing, it might be observed that calling a journalist a journalist does not necessarily mean that he/him/she/her/they is a journalist.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Brilliant way to start the day. Haven’t stopped laughing for at least ten minutes. More like this please – even the dumbest Guardian readers might start quivering an eyebrow!
And to top it all, you’re guaranteed a ‘happy ending.’
That’s reptilist
Ah, the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, an assembly of fiction authors.
The earth’s 4.6billion year history has all come down to Hitting Vulnerable Indonesian Trans Sex Workers!
Oh, the poor little mites!
What about the one that says frogs will croak a semi tone higher because of climate change. Or the one that said pigs will fart quieter because of climate change. Or the one that said humans will shrink back to pigmy size. ————-OK so I made it all up. But what is the difference between me making it all up and government funded scientists making it all up? ——-The only difference is that I get no taxpayer subsidy
Perhaps the increasingly ridiculous nature of these scare stories is a sign that the alarmists realise that they are losing the battle of ideas, that the tide has turned (!) and that fewer and fewer people give them any credence? It’s a shame that Numberwatch has gone into hibernation, although its corpse is still embalmed at: https://web.archive.org/web/20120419022917/http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
Unfortunately we are left with a compromised, unaffordable power supply and transport chaos.
And of course the frogs will disappear, models show: https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/poison-dart-frog
How many people spotted that actually, that is the most ridiculous statement of all.
Just to be clear, Indonesia is comprised of over 17,000 islands, totalling 1.9 million square kilometres spread out over literally thousands of kilometres.
The idea that you can produce some meaningful temperature statistic for an entire year for all that area and then assert that there has been a change in five years of 0.14°C, a difference so small you couldn’t even feel it.
But that’s where we are. We are so used to hearing and repeating insane things that even an intelligent and well meaning person like Mr Morrison ends up writing something so ridiculous without realising (i presume) that it’s complete nonsensical garbage.
Some things lose their meaning when you average them ——Temperature is one of those things. Mainly because temperature is not an amount of anything. Indonesia doesn’t have a temperature and neither does Earth. Sure you can record thousands of temperatures on thermometers and work out some average or other, but the number you get is not actually a temperature. It is just a statistic. It is not the temperature of anything.
Absolutely. And it would be nice if Mr Morrison didn’t indulge the stupidity by using these meaningless stats even if they supposedly favour his argument. Or if he does, at least he should mention that the statistic doesn’t actually make any sense.
It’s not my intention to appear critical of Mr Morrisson.I really appreciate his reporting on climate policy here on the DS.
I just think it’s worth making the point that when we use the distorted language and false concepts that are used to prop up these ideologies, we are implicitly accepting them and therefore inadvertently conceding an argument that should never be conceded.
Like the word pandemic applied to covid 19. It’s a gross distortion of language to cement the idea that covid was an extremely dangerous diseases when it just wasn’t.
400 journalists from across the world take lengthy sabbaticals to be indoctrinated into the campaign to push a climate ‘emergency’ narrative into every conceivable story.
I reminded of the situation a few years ago (probably ongoing) in which many local newspapers carried articles with essentially the same script and graphics, entitled something like “What would [XYZ] look like if sea levels rose?” The XYZ was replaced by the locality of the paper, and the graphics appeared to be simply the output of the same computer program when told to produce a map of the coastline around XYZ. The maps all re-drew the coastline in a suitably scary colour scheme to show how far inland the “rising sea level” would reach, typically by going up estuaries and flood plains.. Based on the notion that “a picture is worth a thousand words” I would guess that readers would remember the scary graphic but forget all the words like “would”, “if”, and “might”. The question I ask is: who funded the development of the program and its targeted marketing to many local newspapers? It’s fairly cheap to produce, but is obviously based on objective data like land height merged with model data of sea level rise of a few feet: the rest is just colouring in blue pixels.
Quite separately, in schools some twenty years ago as teachers we had to create or use pre-created teaching materials such as “Why Doncaster might be a coastal resort by 2050”. Although presented as a game in a light-hearted manner, the teaching materials surely left the children with the image that Doncaster (or their local town) WOULD be a coastal resort if they flew away on holiday but all would be well if they built windmills, put their rubbish in coloured bins and painted their school in rainbow colours.
It was was much the same in learning how to teach English as a Second Language in schools: the “comprehension” articles we used often used materials derived from the Global Warming narrative or sometimes the anti-colonialism movement. I felt that this was subliminal indoctrination for those causes, but it was dangerous to comment on this.
Summary: the infiltration of climate change ideas is apparent not just in journalism but in education. Who is paying for all this? Why are sceptics blocked?
Nothing like a climate & trans story to hide the news that Sir Sneer is going to introduce an NHS App as the way to resolve the NHS problems.
HuxleyP and others foresaw this as the WEF need digital control over our lives.
It has nothing to do with medicine since the three biggest groups who use the services would not be able to use an App eg
1) The elderly with cognitive decline
2) The mentally ill
3) The addicted
Another conspiracy theory come true.
The mediocrity of the people that wield all this power against us is so depressing.
An App. FFS.
And don’t forget that Slimey Sunak’s father in law is cofounder of Infosys, a company which works very closely with the WEF and runs the largest digital ID and social credit systems in the world…. be afraid, very afraid
“How climate change is causing cases of trans spread Venereal Disease in Indonesia to plummet!” So, good news then.
Another excellent article from the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
It also shows the new Globalist/Communist neurolinguistic programming term “vulnerable”, now applied to every type of criminal, along with “mental health problems”, inviting sympathy with predators instead of their victims.
It’s a bizarre & wild garbage story but why not when they know most people believe anything they hear ?
id like some grant to research & 100% prove how climate “crisis” is effecting the lives of snakes disguised as human politicians by making them richer
I lap up everything you write here, Chris, but this story did not warrant coverage other than on 01 April.