Slowly and surely the forces of climate science misinformation reach out from their academic bases to throttle debate and proscribe off-message reporting. Leading the way recently was the University of Exeter, where an Associate Professor of Geography found a “distinct problem” in pictures being published of blue seas and people on the beach during a summer heatwave while the climate is breaking down. Over in the Politics Department, another associate professor is investigating how computers can be used to help track down climate change wrongthink.
Writing in the Guardian, Associate Professor Saffron O’Neill complained that ‘fun in the sun’ photos were a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown. Such images, she said, “can hold the same power” as photos of the tanks in Tiananmen Square, and smoke billowing from the twin towers. Writing on the climate science site Watts Up With That?, Eric Worrall said his first thought was “someone should check for fungus growing in the University of Exeter water supply”. But seriously, he continued, “imagine what a locked down medieval dystopia we would all endure if these killjoys were fully in charge”.
O’Neill’s paper of course assumes that climate breakdown is leading to hotter and more frequent heatwaves. “Not everyone is having fun during heatwaves superpowered by climate breakdown – for vulnerable people they can be deadly,” she says.
Let us consider some of these claims. In the U.K., the Met Office now calls three balmy days of 25°C on the Cornish Riviera a ‘heatwave’. Hot weather, a feature not unknown even as far north as 50 degrees, has been politicised. As for the weather being ‘superpowered’ by climate breakdown, it is of interest to note that the average temperature in the U.K. for the 2010s was colder than the 2000s. As we have seen in numerous Daily Sceptic articles, global warming started slowing down about two decades ago, with dips, pauses and standstills common across the planet. Of course, vulnerable people can die during hot spells, but far more suffer during cold weather. The Office for National Statistics recently estimated that over half a million fewer people died in England and Wales over the last 20 years due to the small rise in temperature. Over 90% of this was attributed to milder winters. Humans are sub-tropical creatures – we generally prefer it a little hotter than colder.
But O’Neill sees positive signs for the future. “Media outlets are increasingly working towards more responsible and accurate coverage of climate change – for example, there are far fewer occasions now where the journalistic norm of balanced reporting contributes to informationally biased coverage, unlike in the early 2000s when ‘balance as bias’ was far more prevalent.” In plain English, this translates as mainstream journalists are much tamer these days, having largely given up their pesky habit of asking questions and reporting all the facts.
Meanwhile, over at the Exeter Politics Department comes exciting news that computer models are being developed to track down “climate disbeliefs”. According to Associate Professor of Computational Social Science Travis Coan, among the heresies being collated are suggestions that climate moves in natural cycles, that the Sun plays a part in climate change, that carbon dioxide was much higher in the past, that CO2 starts to lose its warming effect beyond certain levels and that water vapour has a part to play in the weather.
Back in the real world, perhaps for those of us with a cleaner water supply, all these factors are considered by scientists trying to understand the climate. This includes scientists who are alarmed at rising levels of CO2.
Quite how the Exeter computer model will differentiate between scientific debate and ‘misinformation’ is unclear. Attempts are made to deduce “reasoning fallacies” – hence “the weather is cold somewhere on a certain day” may be factually correct, while “the weather is cold today, therefore global warming is not happening”, is not. You might wonder how the computer programme would deal with a recent news item from the BBC Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, who noted that the odds of record India and Pakistan heatwaves were swelled by climate change. No doubt it would jump on the Met Office’s claim that climate change in these areas makes heatwaves “100 times more likely”. In the world of climate misinformation, individual days of hot weather show the climate is changing, individual days of cold do not. In fact, both suggestions are simply unscientific opinions.
Needless to say, fears of ‘conspiracy’ often surface when modern academics gather to shine the light on wrongthink. In 2009 there was a leak of a large number of emails written by leading IPCC writers from the University of East Anglia. Among the more damaging documents, in a scandal that was known as ‘Climategate’, was a message from Dr. Phil Jones, then head of the Climatic Research Unit, that stated: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is.” At the time, an appalled George Monbiot of the Guardian wrote: “Pretending the climate email leak isn’t a crisis won’t make it go away.”
According to Coan, the contrarian preoccupation with conspiratorial narratives stands in contrast to media articles about climate change, where coverage of Climategate supposedly “dwindled within days”. Of course it didn’t really, as Monbiot correctly forecast. But years of subsequent whitewash inquiries, sympathetic and rewritten media accounts, messenger blaming, and even a film written by an Extinction Rebellion supporter for the BBC, have largely succeeded in erasing it from the public memory.
No conspiracy there, then.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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It’s not always that simple.
Like anything else, there are good scientists and there are bad scientists.
We have all worked in environments where we wonder how our boss got to be where he is, because he’s clearly incompetent at doing our job never mind his.
The scientific workplace is no different.
The Peter Principle?
Yes but did government base policies on your boss’s incompetent pronouncements that damage people’s well being?
Nice one!
As usual, TN, BN. Trust nobody, believe nothing.
I suppose someone’s happy to waste money on these deranged drongos. Cui bono?
The killjoy we shall always have with us.
The sunbather likewise.
Glad someone else remembers the ice age threat!
Lot’s of us.
Hollywood made a film about it in 2004 called The Day After Tomorrow about a climatologist making a daring trek from Washington DC to New York to reach his son trapped in an global storm that plunges the planet into a new Ice Age
A bit off message in 2022 but won Enviromental Award in 2004
Faulty data models, main stream media pushing The Science, anyone suggesting that the data tells a different story is shut down, and a government following a stupid set of policies that do more harm than good.
Climate – covid by another name.
I would like to believe a growing number of us are now realising the facts and data are largely irrelevant to these looming catastrophes we are regularly subjected to. Anything that helps increase the size of government and its bureaucracy, triggers new laws and regulations and leads to more QUANGOs is good. Anything challenging this must be silenced.
Doesn’t seem to matter if it is climate, institutional racism, trans nonsense or anything else. There is a committed collection of people who want more government, more control, less individuality and privacy, less normality.
The Western Global Elites appear to be deliberately seeding and generating a total crisis for mankind on every level and are fermenting chaos, fear and confusion in order to deconstruct our societies and depopulate the world.
Nothing else explains it all or makes any sense.
It is all there in the early videos of the WEF.
I like the theory but, let’s be honest, if they’re replacing one system they screwed up with another one, what’s the chances they won’t screw up the new one.
They are ambitious but incompetent.
And being completely serious about it, amongst others, the Romans, Genghis Khan and Hitler all had a run at global domination and failed.
What we in ‘The West’ frequently fail to recognise is that there’s a big world outside Klaus Schwab’s elite bubble well beyond his puny US/UK/EU reach who just don’t give a monkeys about climate change, a new world order or covid.
We are told they do by our compliant media, but they really couldn’t care less when they can sell a covid mask for the price of a meal or a cigarette.
Putin, Xi, Africans and South Americans aren’t going to comply with our largely northern hemisphere fantasies dreamed up by fantasists who imagine everyone is as wealthy as they are.
If you remember the dotcom bubble of the 90’s that burst, we are now in the era of the globalist bubble, that’s about to burst as well.
I think it is certain that the WEF bubble will burst at some point, but not until more damage, much more damage has been done in the West. For 70 years, communism existed in Russia, while the rest of the world largely rejected it, did it not.?
Well Red Hot whilst I admire your optimism, when I look around I can only find a few sane wardens in charge of the asylums.
With the exception of Hungary and a handful of ex communist East European countries – now that Australia has fallen – Could you name any rational world leader?
I being an old fashioned believer do really think we are in satanic times.
Exactly so.
Great post – I do hope you are right! But nothing has interrupted them so far and the damage is already huge and will gather a momentum all of its own..
They will screw it up of course! They are crazed elitist fantasists who have built a model based on lies and the law of unintended consequences is brutal.
However, the chaos and collapse that will surely follow will be all-embracing beyond any Billionaire’s means to avert or direct – they will lose control of their monster – just like Frankenstein!
Demolishing morality and law creating famine, attacking food production wrecking supply chains and disrupting acceptance of the social and economic balance of life – that just about keeps the world turning- all on a false prospectus, designed simply and crudely to enrich the rich and eliminate or destroy the poor, is surely doomed to fail catastrophically for all concerned.
For the US to implode and deiberately destroy the stability that it provided for the Western world will leave a vaccum for murderous gangster s to fill – it is already evident.
Yes, Russia and China are pulling back to watch the show!
The West’ s; assault ok its own “Enlightenment” and elevation of “false science” to impose their writ will lead to disastrous even barbaric outcomes for all . The stone age of the mind beckons! Hi-tech plus stone age morality?
“The fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation” by Brian Ward -Perkins is a useful, if chilling, read!
Correct, the whole ideology has no basis in fact.
What it does have is the complete rejection of man’s mind, his means of survival and, hence, is always accompanied by doomsday proclamations. Lockdown came from the same philosophy.
Well said! “The rejection of man’s mind”
Those in charge are dangerous psychopaths – megalomaniacs, directing an army of amoral, greedy self-severs and ignorant stooges, aided and sustained by the stupid .
There appear to be so few honest men and women left anywhere near the levers of power in the Western world.
As Schwab boastfully told us, he has not only his ” Young Leaders” but their Cabinets as well – in fact they have completed their ” Long ( subversive) March” (begun in the UK, along with “devolution” deconstruction of the State by Blair), through all the World’s Institutions.
Yep, remember the coming ice age scare in the 70s well.
Failed predictions from the Change the Weather cult are a cottage industry in themselves:
The propaganda of science has become the enemy of civilised societies.
We are heading, at a rate of knots, towards technocratic fascism. That being, governments so ignorant of science that they have no way of resisting it.
Science is more often wrong than it is right. Were it otherwise, there would be no need for experiments.
How do we know science is right? We don’t, because science proposes theories, so named because they are uncertain, but only the best evidence we have of the moment.
Science does not deal in facts. Everything in science is considered a variable, subject to change at any given moment.
Gravity, the universal constant that has never been explained is a phenomenon. No one understands why mass attracts mass.
“But there was one Elephant—a new Elephant—an Elephant’s Child—who was full of ‘satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions. And he lived in Africa, and he filled all Africa with his ’satiable curtiosities. He asked his tall aunt, the Ostrich, why her tail-feathers grew just so, and his tall aunt the Ostrich spanked him with her hard, hard claw. He asked his tall uncle, the Giraffe, what made his skin spotty, and his tall uncle, the Giraffe, spanked him with his hard, hard hoof. And still he was full of ‘satiable curtiosity! He asked his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, why her eyes were red, and his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, spanked him with her broad, broad hoof; and he asked his hairy uncle, the Baboon, why melons tasted just so, and his hairy uncle, the Baboon, spanked him with his hairy, hairy paw. And still he was full of ’satiable curtiosity! He asked questions about everything that he saw, or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched, and all his uncles and his aunts spanked him. And still he was full of ‘satiable curtiosity!”
(Extract from Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child, https://www.poeticous.com/kipling/the-elephants-child)
Anyone curious enough to ask about the wizard behind the climate curtain is mercilessly spanked because his science is settled.
Excellent point that science is more often wrong than right. Backed up by Prof Ioannidis’ 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, said to be the 21st century’s most cited scientific paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
History will look back on the Climate Emergency That Never Was and the economic, energy and food emergencies that really were.
And still humanity won’t learn from history.
What about Gates, his pandemics , Fauci’s bio-experiments and experimental vaccines – the war on public health and our natural immune systems is already now in its second phase!
Who will write the history?
There is no contemporary history of the Dark Ages and three quarters of Rome’s great literature was lost .
I’m not mad about Saffron
Donovan was.
Some clever people who follow “the science” knitted it back together.
The latest NOAA and TSI (total solar irradience) data show a strong correlation with the Grand Solar Minimum predicted by UK-based solar physicist Professor Valentina Zharkova.
She reckons global temperatures are going to continue to fall gradually over the next three decades, culminating in a drastic drop likely to bring problems far greater than anything dreamed up by climate change activists during balmy recent decades.
If the Prof, with a 97 percent record for accurate modelling, is right, Extinction Rebellion supporters of the future will need a new set of slogans lots of warm clothes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xg6CKxOK1U
I just watched the Sam Bailey interview with Kevin Corbett. He describes how, over the last 40 years, there has taken place a pernicious corruption of medicine, through the manipulation of evidence and fraudulent testing. Test evidence directed towards achievement of politicised aims. The same corruption of true science and evidence can be seen in climate research, it’s science for political and sociological ends. I suspect it is the same in many other areas, a good idea corrupted into bad practice with bad outcomes, and no-one dares speak out.
As soon as people get a whiff of power, many become corrupt. Christianity was corrupted in the middle ages, those in positions of power inflicting unspeakable punishments and miseries on victims, all in the name of God. Human nature hasn’t changed, these manipulative individuals are now in government, medicine, the various universities and quangos rather than the church. They are making the lives of ordinary people worse, not better, and getting rich on the back of it. There is so much power and money behind the scenes, that the brave individuals opposing corruption are in fear of their lives, not just losing their jobs.
It will only change when we all cry “Enough!” Everyone at every level has to become uncooperative and unmanageable. Question everything. The alternative is violent protest, and hunger will doubtless lead there.
Spot on.
Humans, like all life, are essentially self-serving. Altruism does not exist. Overall, religion was a force for good but now its moderating influence has all but gone we are reverting to our natural state: the law of the jungle.
Maslow’s famous “Hierarchy of Needs” comes to mind again – they want most of us grovelling around in their digital dirt on the bottom level, fighting over their mealy worms and “catching a vax” while changing gender every month on command!
Er…remind me ….what happened to the Tsar and his entire family again, following on from Citizen Louis Capet or ‘that Man of Blood”, Charles Stuart?
They’re not ”killjoys”. They’re control freaks.
Just Psychopaths.
The Exeter model is just a model based on desire, conjecture and leaving out undesirable stuff. I don’t think the public have much faith in models any more, Ferguson did a sterling job with that!
Exeter just needs a model that produces one simple number- 42 – the answer to life, the universe & everything! Fans of Hitchhikers Guide will already know this.
I gather that the ozone hole has reduced, possibly because of control of refrigerant gasses (except China). This might be a case when we really have been able to achieve something but good luck with the rest of controlling the weather and natural cycles. Pure hubris.
This site publishes data on the size and ozone density, it is still there, basically looks to be not growing but also not shrinking either since around 1990. Bottom left of the page has the history graph.
Link
Prices Double: Obsession With Subsidised Wind & Solar Causes Runaway Power Prices
https://stopthesethings.com/2022/05/22/prices-double-obsession-with-subsidised-wind-solar-causes-runaway-power-prices/
Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity is the product of policies deliberately designed to wreck reliable and affordable power supplies. Massive and seemingly endless subsidies to chaotically intermittent wind and solar have done what they were” STOP THESE THINGS
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Scratch underneath the surface and you will find Globalist/Marxist/Communist/Socialist sympathisers and control-freaks behind this kind of stuff, every time. It is way past time they were exposed, defunded and removed from positions of influence and authority.
Our real enemies are the totally amoral’ Faux Conservatives like Johnson and his entire Government , who have deceived the people and are even now stealing our democracy and freedoms with oppressive, unopposed legislation against our Human Rights and ancient Freedoms soley for their own cynical advancement.
Attributed to Johnson: I would rather be having a good time and making money.
We have a ‘Government of Lies’ who despise the people who elected them – and for good measure we have an opposition, led by a Globalist ‘Trilateral Commission’ Cypher, without a shred of morality or integrity and not a clue what they would even do in power. other than copy Johnson..
Broken politics and a censored media, owned and directed by Globalists. So, which way forward?
Nobody knew about the ozone hole until DuPont “sponsored” a bunch of scientists to measure it.
Why would they do that? Their 50yr monopoly on refrigerant gasses was about to come to an end, they needed an excuse to create a new monopoly on their newly patented replacement.
Trebbles all round.
The problem for the climate hysterics is that the science and the scientific evidence doesn’t agree with them.
Why let a little thing like that stop you?!
What hope is there. No one has proven climate crisis. The world should’ve been dead by now from their early predictions. We would do better to focus on simple pollution.
Oh, and the hole in the ozone layer. I presume that that has closed.
Actually it is closing as a result of the Montreal Protocol.