“Check out my DeSmog page here,” is what Tom Nelson writes in the ‘About’ section of his Substack publication, to link his profile on a publication called DeSmog. Calling itself “the world’s number one source for accurate, fact-based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns”, DeSmog is a well-known platform to try and debunk – or smear – the so-called climate sceptics. The publication was founded in January 2006 by Canadian PR-expert James Hoggan. Hoggan has said that his interest in climate issues began in 2003 when he was invited to join the board of the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental organisation that unconditionally backs the theory of a man-made climate crisis. Interaction with pro-climate crisis scientists and political activists such as Al Gore led Hoggan to take the climate issues presented to him very seriously, and this led to the founding of DeSmog – “to raise awareness and help people become savvy about the global problem of climate change disinformation”.
Climate crisis PR and the ‘disinformation database’
Indirectly, the origin story itself shows that the purpose of the publication is not to provide unbiased scientific information on the arguments of all parties to the climate debate, but to present only one side of the science to the public so as to support the founders’ chosen and unchallengeable basic claim that humans are changing the climate and a catastrophe lies ahead. In essence, the website can also be seen as a PR-publication for one side, which ironically was acknowledged by Richard Littlemore, one of DeSmog‘s key authors back in the day, as early as 2009. In November 2009, emails from scientists on the computer server of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit were made public by a whistleblower or perhaps hackers. The whole affair became known as Climategate. These emails contained 15 years of communications between the most prominent climate scientists in the world. And they were embarrassing. The emails provided insight into the practices that ranged from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests and trying to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered. In the midst of this scandal, DeSmog author Littlemore informed Michael Mann, author of the flawed ‘hockey stick’ graph of rising temperatures in the 20th century and a prominent climate scientist who played a major role in Climategate and mainstream climate science in general, that DeSmog‘s role in reporting on the issue was “all about PR here, not much about science”.
While such bias should make one sceptical of the publication, DeSmog is used by both the mainstream press and fact-checkers of all kinds as a source of essentially unchallengeable truth today. And despite the errors – which can happen with any of us – there is in fact a great deal of truth to be found there. For example, it factually describes that John F. Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, has said he does not believe there is a climate crisis. Similarly, it reviews the lives and work of many other scientists of the same calibre, and shows where and in what words they have denied a man-made climate crisis. But if everything is as said, what is the problem? The point is that the heading under which information about these renowned scientists and other ‘sceptics’ is listed to the public is called ‘Climate Disinformation Database’.
Nelson’s profile, which he refers to on his Substack, is also on the same database. Why is he giving a link to it? “It’s quoting what I have actually said. Somebody spent a lot of time on it, and I wouldn’t have spent that much time myself to write up this kind of ‘about me’ page. So it’s a pretty good ‘about me’ page and if people want to take a look at it, they can get a reference to my work over the last few years,” Nelson explains. DeSmog‘s Editor, for example, has read through all of his posts on social media platform X and highlighted the most important ones. It also outlines which prominent scientists he has interviewed on his climate podcast. And there’s also a section explaining that Nelson is the producer of Climate: The Movie, a recent documentary by British documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin, which critically examines the climate catastrophe claims. Nelson says he is not at all bothered by the coverage of his work alongside world-renowned scientists at such a ‘disinformation database’. “Whenever somebody in the climate cult talks about ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’, I replace that with ‘information’ and that’s what it is – it’s information,” he says.
How a woodpecker led to climate realism
Nelson is an electronic engineer with a Master’s degree and has worked in tech and software for many years. He became interested in climate issues in the second half of the 2000s, and this is linked to his hobby of birdwatching. In 2004, claims were made of the rediscovery in the United States of a species of bird that was declared extinct in the 1980s, the ivory-billed woodpecker. Nelson recalls it was reported on the radio and some people were moved to tears that a species thought to no longer exist had been rediscovered. It was also the subject of an in-depth, peer-reviewed paper by 17 authors published in a scientific journal. But when Nelson delved deeper, he discovered something he was not expecting to find – no evidence of the supposed rediscovery. According to him the whole story was based on a particularly blurry video and an even blurrier photo as evidence of the species’ rediscovery. “It was completely crazy. It was just groupthink. They didn’t see it and they never did get a picture of it. It was all a complete crock,” Nelson says.
Around the same time, a friend told him to take a similar look at the debate about climate and global warming. Until then, he hadn’t paid much attention to the issue and believed that if that’s what the scientists were saying, then humans were probably causing global warming with their CO2 emissions, and possibly a catastrophe would eventually follow. “When I looked at the evidence for myself I was surprised to find that there was nothing, no evidence that there’s a climate crisis,” he says. According to Nelson, anyone can search and look for themselves and see for themselves whether the heat is really too warm now, or were the heatwaves of the 1930s worse? Are polar bears really going extinct? Have yields dropped dramatically? Are droughts in the U.S. state of California worse than 200 years ago? Is the stormy weather becoming more frequent and storms more powerful? Are there really more wildfires?
“You don’t have to be a climatologist. You don’t have to have a degree. Just an ordinary person who can read data and use Google and look at graphs – you can check all these alarming things yourself,” he says. “It’s a complete crock. All of it. Every single bit of anything alarming you’ve heard about the climate and CO2 causing bad weather, it’s all a complete baloney. Not true and no evidence supports it,” Nelson says.
Since about 2006, he has been researching, publishing and arguing about climate issues on a daily basis. According to Nelson, the whole climate emergency is a scam for power and money. There is a lot of money in the energy transition movement, while all sorts of ‘climate restrictions’, be they carbon credits or nudges to change our diets from beef to insects, or possible travelling instructions, are part of this power play, he argues.
Podcast interview led to producing the film
Nelson started his climate podcast series in 2022, where he critically discusses climate science with renowned scientists and other researchers interested in the topic. One of his first guests was documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin. Nelson was already a fan of Durkin’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was released back in 2007. This film as well critically examined the climate catastrophe predictions.
Speaking about the film, Durkin said at one point that he could actually make a much more meaningful film now. This led to the plan to make a new film and Nelson joined the project as the producer. The new film was released in March this year. Nelson says all the credit for making the film goes to Durkin. “He did all the interviews. He wrote the script, he did the narration and I give him 100% of the credit, to him and his team, for producing such a great movie,” he says, adding that the film didn’t cost much to make financially. “Martin is very good at spending small amounts of money well, and it did not cost that much to make this movie. Largely travel and a lot of people volunteered their time,” Nelson says.
The declaration of a man-made climate crisis is criticised in the film by a number of respected scientists: the aforementioned Nobel Laureate in Physics Dr. Clauser, Professor Steven Koonin, who is the author of Unsettled and a former Provost and Vice-President of Caltech, Professor Richard Lindzen, who is a former Professor of Meteorology at Harvard and MIT, Princeton Physics Professor William Happer, Professor Nir Shaviv from Racah Institute of Physics in Israel, Professor Ross McKitrick from the University of Guelph and several others.
Nelson points out that many people may even be surprised to learn that these scientists, who are also called ‘climate deniers’, do not actually say that the climate is not changing, but on the contrary, they say that the climate is changing all the time. It is simply a question of the cause of climate change, or in other words, of why the change is happening. The climate is a complex system, and we obviously do not even know all the drivers. But the world-renowned physicists Clauser, Koonin, Lindzen and other scientists who speak in the film are given the title of ‘climate deniers’ simply because they oppose, for example, the claim that climate change is caused solely or mainly by anthropogenic CO2.
Since people are constantly presented with CO2 as the main cause, it becomes ingrained in their consciousness, even though they may not have any idea how much of CO2 there actually is in the atmosphere. “People don’t know that it’s about 0.04%. They’re guessing numbers like 5% or more. People are worried that the atmosphere is going to fill with CO2. They think CO2 maybe looks like black gas, black soot or something,” Nelson notes, adding that this ignorance is kind of baffling.
There is no business model behind the film
Nelson points out that they didn’t make the climate film to make money. “We just want a lot of people to see it, because it’s just so important to fight back against this scam. It is kind of the fight of our lifetimes. Because if we let the bad guys win, they’re going to reduce our freedom. And it’s going to be a much worse world if we let them impose all this crazy stuff on us to try to prevent bad weather,” Nelson says. “And as I keep saying, we could spend $50 trillion. We could never have an internal combustion car again. Never eat any meat and go live in caves. And still, there would be no measurable weather or climate benefit ever,” Nelson says.
There has been a major media push to block the film. Facebook, for example, has declared it ‘misinformation’ on the basis of the opinions of fact-checking portals it funds, and these fact-checks also form the basis of what the mainstream press thinks. However, Nelson says that this has not significantly disrupted the distribution of the film, as it has been widely shared, including on platforms that do not engage in censorship – such as X or Rumble. “It’s going to be very hard for anyone to take it down just because it’s up everywhere now,” Nelson says, adding that it’s a little surprising that the film is still available on YouTube.
When will the climate crisis be over?
There are a number of factors, apart from the press and the attitude of the social media companies, that are hindering the spread of critical assessments of the climate crisis. For example, many young scientists, who are also critical of the issue, are reluctant to express their criticism publicly. “They don’t dare to speak out because they’re not going to get published then. They might lose their job. Their family might get some blowback,” Nelson says. If a researcher can no longer publish his or her work in the scientific press, it essentially puts a damper on his or her entire career. “It’s so much easier to just sit back and pretend it’s true,” Nelson says.
However, he believes that this is all changing as more and more people start to look critically at the whole issue. One of the reasons for this ‘awakening’, according to Nelson, is the Covid crisis – a fact that has been acknowledged to him by a number of people recently. “They say they found out that we were not being told the truth about Covid and that the Government and the press were lying to us. And then they started asking themselves, what else are they lying to us about?” he says.
The mainstream press, of course, is still in the business of avoiding these questions and all too often labelling them as misinformation, but Nelson notes that by now one might well be asking, what is the mainstream really? For example, Joe Rogan’s well-known podcast has 14.5 million followers, which makes publications like CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post look like dwarfs in comparison. For instance, CNN’s prime time ratings have dropped constantly and are now below 500,000. Rogan and other podcast producers with large audiences, however, are already ridiculing climate alarmism. What this means, according to Nelson, is that more and more people are becoming climate realists. Nelson ultimately believes that the whole climate catastrophe movement will crumble faster than we would think. “I think people are just going to stop talking about it. I think that’s how this is going to end. There’s not going to be a big revelation where people say, hey, we were wrong completely. Sorry about that. They’re just going to stop talking about it. That’s my prediction,” Nelson says.
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“The Climate Scare Will Crumble Sooner Than You Expect”:
Not while the guardian draws breath it won’t!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/09/carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-record
Let’s hope they don’t let it out again – all that (hot) CO2!
I just read the Guardian article and the thing it’s based on. A 1% annual increase in CO2 despite all the myriad controls and banning of this that and the other going on in the world. The controls are clearly not very effective and so the G’s solution is… let’s have more of them!
Even better, where is the world’s CO2 monitor? On top of a bloody volcano!
Nobel prizes for all involved!
Updated to add: The G keeps asking me to pay for this drivel – I won’t.
It is going to gradually warm is we’re coming out from the Mini Ice Age.
It has been getting gradually cold for some time. About 25 years or so. Snow in winter had completely vanished in middle Europe by 2000. Since then, it has made a comeback. IMHO, that’s why the climate changers are getting ever more hysterical. They have access to the raw weather data and know the real trend. Unscientifically, I haven’t yet turned the heating on today but I’ll certainly do in the evening when it will have gotten positively chilly. That’s certainly a temperature record for June but not the kind that’s making headline all the time.
The mini Ice Age was the time of the Maunder minimum, essentially the last grand solar minimum which appears to operate on a cycle of about 370 years. Add 370 to 1680 and you get 2050, which will be around the time that the coming grand solar minimum will reach its lowest solar output.
Once solar cycle 25, which is around solar maximum now, starts to decline we will see a reduction of solar output over the next 20-40 years which is likely to reduce the global temperature by about 1C on average. This will feel pretty cold, all talk of global temperatures increasing is likely to cease.
The sun provides almost all of our energy in terms of maintaining the biosphere temperatures, less from the sun means it gets colder. Over longer periods the earth’s distance from the sun varies as the barycentre of the solar system moves as the outer planet orbital motion means their masses affect this significantly. This is the cause of the last Ice Age and is likely to recur in the future. Maybe by then fusion power will finally have arrived.
Even better, where is the world’s CO2 monitor? On top of a bloody volcano!
There are certainly CO₂ measurement stations in other places of the earth. But their results are presumably absolutely not what the global warmists want to publish.
“Stop talking about it”, that’s what happened with Covid. I believe most realised they had been foolish and, rather than make a fuss, state they were lied to, they just simply do not mention it.
I believe that the Climate Crisis will end when we have a bad winter and there is a fundamental collapse of society. An awful lot of people will wake up realising they are dead.
I’ve talked to my wife about this and am looking at getting a wood burner, one that works without electricity, installed. When the lights go out the heating also stops. Some Minister a few years ago claimed central heating will work without electricity: it has an electrical pump. We are old enough to remember the strikes labour intend to bring back where the lights went out, the gas went off, the bread wasn’t baked and the dead were not buried as the rubbish piled up.
We can live with all of that, we know how, but we are too old to survive freezing temperatures. Besides which, why should we die because politicians love to lie?
This is one of the few cases where a battery backup is actually practical. We’ve got a battery (with manual switchover) which should be able to keep our gas boiler running for a day. We’ve tested it works but not the run duration. It would be sensible if we bought a battery with greater capacity. We keep it trickle charged with a mini solar panel (typically for use for caravans). We’ve also got a wood burner – but that doesn’t help with hot water.
Great idea. The other thing I noted with my wife was we made the mistake of fitting an electric oven when we renovated our home after buying it. It was a stupid mistake on my part.
Six years ago I didn’t realise how ridiculous Government was going to get. We now live in a country where there is an existential issue for tens of thousands of people: if the electricity fails due to policy, which it will, they will die.
I am sorry to hear you didn’t realise what is going on with government, climate and energy until 6 years ago, but at least now you know. I have been looking into and educating myself on this issue since about 2007. ——-The climate story is indeed a cautionary tale. It is “Official Science” not “Science”, and climate change is the basis for a political agenda where Technocrats run the world and control the wealth and resources. —-It has and never has had anything to do with the climate. The climate is simply the very plausible excuse for the politics.
A wise choice, since after 2030 you won’t be able to get a gas oven and the gas supply will be switched off in due course.
I got a wood stove in 2022. Can I advise you to look for stoves with a cooking hub on top. I boiled a small kettle on mine that is without a hub and you get a smell of paint. I wish I thought of that when buying but I was mostly concentrating on capacity and price.
Unless you specified otherwise with the installers, your battery back-up will be disconnected during power cut. This prevents power from your battery going back into the grid, an electrocution risk of technicians are working on the circuit, or damage to equipment.
The thing with batteries people seem incapable of understanding, is the intermittency from wind which makes grid supply unreliable, makes battery recharge unreliable too. The assumption is when the battery is discharged during grid failure, by some miracle the wind will start blowing steadily to recharge the battery ready for next time.
Truckle charge it with solar panels: Sun I command thee to shine as and when I require.
Installers? That’s me. Manual switchover, as I said, but actually it’s unplug the lead from the mains and plug it into the battery/inverter – got to be properly earthed though. (Yes, I’ve put a (dis)connector in the line between the fused spur and the boiler.)
Solar trickle (not truckle) charge is used for maintenance of the battery. After testing the system I use a proper mains charger to bring the battery back up to full charge. We could come unstuck with an extended mains outage hence the thinking of more battery capacity. There are limits how far we can go though.
Sorry for the second follow-up on this.
Do you really mean that if someone asks their friendly neighbourhood electrician to install a battery backup system then they’ll get something that fails in a power cut? That strikes me as about as useful as a chocolate teapot (or ashtray on a motorbike or… well, you get the idea).
Yes, get a woodburner/multifuel stove, you will be toasty. We had ours fitted some years ago now, and one thing I wish I had done was to get one with cooking ability. Some come with hobs, or even a hob and oven (Esse is one make that comes to mind). We live somewhere with no mains gas, so no power, no cooking on my electric cooker. We have covered this gap by having a couple of gas powered mini hobs, but cooking on the woodburner would be a far more efficient use of fuel, especially as it absolutely chucks out the heat, even with just a couple of smallish logs.
If Labour form the next government I am pretty certain they will ban woodburners before Winter.
I did consider that aspect and I don’t have access to free wood. I do a lot of woodturning but sadly have to buy most of what I use.
Lots of wood to be gathered with the ash dieback. Landowners may be grateful for people to take car boot loads home over the next few years.
Good luck with that. I would ignore any ban, as I am sure would many others. Living rurally, I would say most people have stoves (and oil heating). If everyone just ignored them, what are they going to do? The courts and prisons are already at breaking point. They can’t lock us all up.
The government burns wood (from virgin and pristine Canadian sources). Would they stop that as well?
I see the Drax trains come past most days down the valley from where I live. They call it Green, the only Green about it is the idiots who claim shipping wood across the Atlantic and then burning it is saving the bloody environment!
Would venture to suggest the same approach vis a vis the TV licence.
They can try, but plenty have them, strength in numbers when you get out of town on that matter.
Does it require electricity for a fan? What make is it? My next door neighbour had one fitted and he swears it heats the entire house but I can tell it’s electric because I can sometimes hear the fan.
No, no electricity. The make is Mendip. Just light it and away you go. We get a lot of power cuts and it’s invaluable. Yes, if you leave doors open (house, not stove!) the heat spreads about the house as well.
In my previous house I had a Rayburn which ran on coal and served for general and water heating and also for cooking. I really miss it!
We have an ‘esse 100 SE’ multi fuel so can burn coal and wood. The stove somehow reburns the initial exhaust gases so it is very fuel efficient and doesn’t put out much smoke.
Maintaining supplies of free wood is not easy so the option to use coal helps although in Saddleworth it has to be smokeless. This information should be available from your local council’s website and I would advise checking because some stoves are on a naughty list. Our stove is rated at 5kw and really pumps heat out.
At 6kw and above you have to fit an exterior wall-mounted extractor fan which is pointless. Unless you have a very big area to heat 5kw will be ample.
A good friend of mine has connected his stove to his central heating system and he tells me that while it won’t replace the standard boiler it will provide some background heat. Obviously you would need the relevant specialist for something like that.
If you want any more information you can always send me a private message and I will try to answer.
Where will you get the wood?
Doesn’t anybody understand “supply chain”?
The trees have to be felled, the trunks transported to a mill, cut to size and/or processed into chips, transported to points of distribution and delivered. Most of that won’t happen without electricity.
You have a point, but most of my wood comes from a local estate where chainsaws do the donkey work (and my oh chops them to size with the axe). We also burn smokeless coal simply because you don’t need to tend the fire so often. If there is no electricity though lighting a fire would be the least of my worries long term. We have got calor gas heaters and several full bottles of gas on standby. We are also looking into fitting a generator as we already have so many power cuts due to ageing infrastructure. If the power went off for a long period I think we would be more concerned with water, food and defending our home. Oh, and the sewage backing up because the pumps have stopped.
Honestly, does anyone in government think all these effing stupid plans through?
They only think how they can advance their wallets and careers pleasing the Globalists.
Some people collect scrap wood, or buy old tables and cut them up. Once wood is split it can dry in six weeks in the air.
Without electricity, no fresh water, no removal of sewage, no internet, no food. Keeping warm will be least of your worries.
Back in the 1970s we were not so dependent on electricity or large supermarkets for food. Also back then, residential power cuts meant power was available to keep essential services going, because electricity was mostly generated by coal and gas which were dispatchable and so continuous.
We are now looking at intermittent supply so rationing residential supply will not make much difference if little or no electricity is being generated. It is also a question of keeping the grid balanced, and intermittency does not permit that, so irrespective of amount being generated, grid sectors will shut down, or even the whole grid.
Watching what Government is doing, is like watching a captain on the ship’s bridge staring at the rocks ahead, in a trance, steering straight for them, looking at them but not seeing them.
In the 70’s, as far as I remember, our sitting room had two wall sockets – one for a standard lamp and one for the TV. It would have been unnecessary extravagance to have had more!
Ah. I think you are asking how people in general will survive once power cuts become the norm. I think many of the rest of us are considering how we’ll cope with occasional power outages.
Yes, if the electricity gets cut nationwide the comms, water, sewage, food import and harvesting, distribution, transport, health care etc etc will get unreliable or fail completely. At that point I would expect bloody revolution – not merely protests. It will be a long climb back to our current relatively civilised comfortable living. Many will die in the poverty and violence.
What I hope is that as the realisation of what Net Zero means dawns on people we will avoid the worst of it. I guess the question is how far down will we sink before we turn it around.
Call me an optimist.
Maybe the scare will be over but the politics won’t. This country has forced itself in law to be Net Zero by 2050 all based on there being a climate crisis for which no real empirical evidence exists. So if the scare is soon to be over do we repeal the Climate Change Act and it’s 2019 amendment? Do we bring a halt to a smart meter roll out and “Dynamic Pricing” which will charge based on demand and or if the wind is blowing that day. Will we stop getting rid of the 25 million or so gas boilers in the houses in this country because there is no climate scare anymore and will those who squandered money on heat pumps be allowed to go back to gas? Will we start using coal again since it is the cheapest way to produce electricity? Will EV’s die a death and clutter up our scrapyards as people go back to reliable and cheaper petrol and diesel? Will be allowed to eat beef and fly in aeroplanes since there is nothing wrong with the climate as many of us have insisted for the last 3 decades? ——-Is any of this likely or will the scare just turn into something we all have to do because of another bunch of excuses the eco socialists at the UN try to fob us off with? Because remember back in the seventies, that the scare was global cooling, but guess what the solutions were? ———-More government control of our lives, just the very same as is happening now. So one way or another the technocrats will want control of us, and if it isn’t the climate scare that they use then it will be whatever else they can conjure up and call it “the science”
It is political and ideological, started and driven by a core of grifters who call themselves climate scientists, with environmentalists and other opportunists jumping on the band wagon to serve their own particular interests.
The debate cannot be won by scientific argument therefore.
It will end when black-outs become routine, round the clock electricity becomes unaffordable to consumers, economies start to collapse. I estimate within the next ten years.
If you follow where money is being invested and disinvested you can see clearly that the agenda has already gone. The markets are obviously ahead of mass consciousness because if they weren’t then they wouldn’t function. Up until a few years ago the Financial Times was the best newspaper in the world in terms of accuracy in regard to predictions. People pay to read it because they want the inside knowledge up front. Of course that was before the West completely lost its mind. Now the prescient ones are just thinking about hoarding as much as they can for when it hits the fan and hoping that some rudimentary precepts of civilisation will be preserved. It is a doomed strategy which has its roots in cowardice and laziness. Only humilty and contrition could help now. Why do you think that any sense of stoicism or acceptance of real challenge or difficulty is absent from the human spirit in western countries? People ask all the time, how is it possible that our leaders are this stupid, evil, degenerate. Surely the fact that they are should tell you that something is wrong.
If you really care then bear in mind you have until about mid August under current conditions. The US is in the process of attempting to send 300,000 soldiers to eastern Europe. This is not as easy as it sounds but that is the intention. We live a goldfish bowln reality where no targets in our country could possibly be hit. You will soon be disabused of this naivete. It is unlikely at that point that any sort of popular pressure would be able to stop the escalation. This is baked in and so you really ought to be thinking about how you wil deal with it. If you are lucky you will have relatives in the southern hemisphere. If not then I would say that the West, especially the Brittanic countries will be in for a very rough time.