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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