Watched by a global audience, last month’s opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris featured an obscene mockery of the Christian Last Supper. Everyone is entitled to their view was a liberal response and some even suggested it was a ‘celebration’ of diverse religious belief. Just days before, the French state fined the second largest rolling news channel CNews €20,000 (£17,000) for failing to question a contributor’s view that human-caused global warming was a scam. Welcome to free speech, French style. It is fine and dandy to mock religious belief, or at least the Christian beliefs held by millions of citizens, but take a sceptical view of a hotly disputed and highly politicised science matter and the fines rain down. Catholicism might be the nominal religion of France but it’s not that of the ruling elites. Their new religion is Gaia worship and like the Medieval Popes of old the courts await for those who dare to challenge infallible dogma handed down by the new climate priests.
CNews is a popular ‘Right-of-centre’ news channel and in August 2023 it featured the opinion of the economist Philippe Herlin that human-caused global warming was a lie and a scam. In his view it was being used to justify the intervention of the state, absolve the State from having to reduce public spending “and is a form of totalitarianism”. The state broadcast regulator Arcom found that CNews’s lack of reaction to his charge was a “failure” to meet an obligation “to ensure an honest presentation of controversial issues”.
This of course is a common complaint used to suppress inconvenient opinions and information. Needless to say it never applies in reverse with mainstream media free to broadcast biased and often false stories about climate ‘collapse’ to their heart’s content. In the U.K., the state-dependent BBC even insists that no contrary and heretical opinion to the ‘settled’ ex-cathedra narrative can pollute its airways. Herlin is brutal in his assessment of the science of anthropogenic climate change, an assessment that can be justified on the basis that no definitive proof yet exists that humans control the climate thermostat. Many eminent scientists note that it is difficult to discern human involvement in a changing and chaotic climate due to the overwhelming noise created by natural variations. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can find no human involvement in changing patterns across most types of weather. Nor can it find any human involvement going forward to 2100.
Climate change has long been a highly-politicised affair. Words such as ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ are recent political inventions and are not to be found within the main body of the IPCC reports. Commenting on the CNews fine, Vijay Jayaraj writing in Watts Up With That? noted that many climate scientists had transformed their discipline into something that hardly qualifies as science. “While their work has the appearance of scientific research and is conducted by those with scientific credentials, both its methodologies and findings are heavily shaped by the agendas of special interest groups, political figures and international governing bodies,” he observed. “Such scientists are supplicants of governments and wealthy foundations wanting particular findings and willing to pay for them,” he added.
Censorship of dissenting commentary about politicised climate science and the proposed mad solution of command-and-control Net Zero takes many forms. Marlowe Hood is the self-styled ‘Herald of the Anthropocene’ at the French State-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP), although he has other sources of income, notably a recent €100,000 award from the foundation of a large Spanish bank heavily involved in funding green technology. He was one of a gang of activists including Graham Readfearn of the Guardian and Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann that recently secured the retraction in Springer Nature of a paper written by three eminent Italian physicists that said the available data did not support a climate ‘emergency’. Much of the data in the paper led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti was based on information used by the IPCC, but Hood claimed it was “grossly manipulated” and “fundamentally flawed”. Mann claimed a scientific consensus that weather ‘extremes’ were increasing and he asked if this ‘wide consensus’ was wrong, “or a couple of nuclear dudes in Italy are wrong”.
The claim of a non-existent consensus is an attempt to shut down debate and in the process destroy the well-tried scientific method based on experiment and continual questioning of existing hypotheses. In many parts of the world, free speech is on the run. Google controls much of the online advertising through its AdSense service but this was cancelled in 2022 for Dr. Roy Spencer whose page showed accurate satellite temperature measurements of the Earth’s atmosphere. His crime was publishing “unreliable and harmful claims”. It just so happens that the satellite data show less warming than that produced by the frequently adjusted and urban heat-ravaged surface measurements. If the measurements had shown more warming, we can assume that they would have been considered helpful and highly reliable.
In the U.K., Hope not Hate receives copious amount of cash from the hard-Left money tree Joseph Rowntree Trust. Hope Not Hate’s campaigning arm runs a successful advertising boycott of GB News, one of only a couple of U.K. regulated broadcasters that casts a sceptical eye on political climate claims. Rowntree has recently topped up the grubby DeSmog operation with £400,000 so it can continue to list climate ‘deniers’ with a view to curbing their growing influence. And of course here at the Daily Sceptic we are denied any advertising revenue, despite around 1.5 million hits a month, due to the antics of political busy-bodies like NewsGuard, a self-appointed assessor of journalist truth and integrity.
Governments, narrative-enforcing regulatory bodies, billionaire foundations, self-styled, cash-packed fact checkers and activist journalists all seem determined to shut down any views they dislike. No debate required. That’s your lot Enlightenment, welcome to a new dark age, fired up by a brand-new digital Inquisition.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Welcome to the new Inquisition. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
OK This is France. But the first thing that came to my mind was that here in the UK the State Broadcaster (BBC) refuses to ever discuss anything at all that might question the “science” or Energy Policies supposedly based on the “science” of climate change. So here in the UK our very own BBC does not see the need for “an honest presentation of controversial issues”. They sneakily get away with this by claiming the issue is not controversial at all and that anyone who thinks it is are like holocaust deniers or like people who say we did not land on the moon, and sometimes even that the earth is flat.
——The rest of the consolidated media also all sing from the same globalist hymn sheet, and it is only on eg GB News or Fox News that the narrative of the “climate crisis” all based on modelling rather than science is questioned, and ofcourse by the great work on websites like this, which won’t be viewed by the vast majority of a population where sadly 70% of them apparently get their news from the BBC.——-I can see that it is probably the same in France and all over the western world captured by Sustainable Development Politics that uses climate change polices in an attempt to control the worlds wealth and resources —and YOU.
GB News Saturday Night Five. Yet again the host let the fallacy of evil c02 go unchallenged, he only questioned our 1% contribution and compared to China. They never seem to invite ex Lib Dem, ex of the Cheeky Girls (just the one of them i think, which one, maybe he had problems there). There seems to be a conspiracy of silence questioning c02. just like any criticism of King Charles the Globalist who salivates over Reset that would wipe out the middle classes.
Any notion we are a democracy when communists with deep pockets censor truth is for the birds.
Great. The more publicity the better.
Trying to silence us only strengthens our argument.
Daring to challenge the new orthodoxy of climate change is the new Blasphemy, the similarities are so evident now, it is the new religion, rather like the Mullahs in Iran, anyone who dares question, who does not follow the dogma absolutley they must be charged with heresy and subjected to a modern form of stoning. I wonder do the French realise they have become a state with the same modus operandi as the Spanish inquisition, or closer to today behaviour akin to the muslim fundamentalists, the only differences being its the Climate that is their God, and whereas they don’t put to death those that do not believe but that is currently, lets wait and see. I wonder what has happened to the owner of Telegram its radio silence on that dissenter.
Poor France it has returned to the pre enlightenment.
This is rife all over the western world. Recently there was a case in Switzerland where some elderly housewives won a case against their government claiming they were not doing enough to “fight climate change”, and here in the UK we have forced ourselves in law to reduce emissions of CO2 by 2050. As we get closer to that date don’t be surprised if your car, your holiday or your Steak Diane becomes illegal.
Hopefully that will awake a sleeping giant as the WW2 saying goes. Even the middle classes will notice. They did a similar thing with the judge ending the granting of fossil fuel licenses.
Not quite the persecution of Galileo… but not that far off either.
Conceptually, it’s identical.
The difference is the penalty. For now.
Eppur si muove
Galileo could have had his discussions in Latin, like everyone else at the time, from Copernicus onwards, but he wrote pamphlets in Italian which was likely to cause political disruption: after all, the Pope was effectively the king of the Papal States, which was going through a sensitive period.
Galileo was the 17th century Al Gore, promoting an incorrect theory (planets don’t have a circular orbits) with NO DATA to back it up. That’s what Kepler had; he had Tycho Brahe’s observations that showed elliptical orbits.
In addition, at the request of the Pope, Galileo wrote a Socratic pamphlet explaining his heliocentric theory (as was the Copernican theory), with a rather stupid questioner that was recognisable as the Pope. Not even Al Gore did that! With the Pope worried that Galileo was disturbing international negotiations, Galileo needed to be removed from the scene. If only that could have been done with the film The Inconvenient Truth.
What Galileo did do was to time objects rolling down a slope so the acceleration due to gravity could be calculated. It was these terrestrial experiments that were the incredible step forward, not his astronomical observations that he tried to bully people into believing. That isn’t Science.
Thank God here in the UK we have BBC Verify led by the stupendous Marianna Spring to ensure that we only ever receive correct information!
Her name is like something from a Harry Potter story, akin to Dolores Umbridge.
There is no accounting for taste but she has an interesting dress sense. One evening I was watching the 6 o’clock news with my wife and she appeared wearing black (fake?) leather trousers with boots and we both thought “huh, that looks a bit kinky!”
Thank you Chris for continuing to expose this corruption of the scientific method.
Remember, remember those running the Vichy State during WWII, were there after the War and the only ones competent and in positions to run it afterwards. The same is true of the NSDAPs in Germany and the Benito Bunch in Italy.
These charmers were also the architects of the European Coal & Steel Community, begat the EEC, and their carefully chosen and trained heirs and successors formed the EU, putative Federal Europe/Fourth Reich.
We are surprised at the behaviour of legacy Fascists because…? We are surprised at Comrade Starmer and his retro-Socialist Liebour Party because…?
Some people just don’t pay attention. History didn’t start yesterday afternoon.
“…hotly disputed and highly politicised science matter…”
Stop right there. It is a hotly disputed and highly politicised matter. There is no science involved, apart from the poor attempts at establishing accurate surface temperatures.
Chris mentions a successful advertising boycott of GB News but I have noticed that the number of different advertisers on the TV channel has been going up lately, which is a tiny bit cheering.