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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