It’s not for nothing that the Royal Society’s motto is Nullius in Verba. “Take no one’s word for it.” Sadly, the Society itself rarely lives up to that motto any more, having long ago traded scepticism for right-on gullibility. Especially when it comes to climate change.
Yet climate change is perhaps the most pressing area where we must pull the sceptic pants all the way up until we give the liars and shonks a big, sceptical wedgie. Because there are few areas of scientific (not to say pseudo-scientific) endeavour more rife with liars, shonks and loons.
And that’s just the mainstream media.
As reputable scientists, from Judith Curry to Steve Koonin, keep pointing out, the gap between what the mainstream media say is “climate science”, and actual, rigorous climate science is a Grand Canyon filled with bullshit and stupidity.
Consider the recent, wall-to-wall hysteria about the alleged “code red for humanity” sounded by the latest IPCC 6 report. Those words don’t even appear in IPCC 6. No matter what the moronic mainstream media would have you believe.
Those words were the political spin from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Lazy environment writers reported that spin, but ignored the fact IPCC 6 had toned down temperature forecasts, found little evidence of increasingly severe storms and admitted much of the warming built into the system might take more than a century to eventuate.
The way-out alarmist projections for the Shape of Climate Things to Come are exactly that: way out. IPCC reports contain a range of scenarios, based on differing assumptions, especially on emissions. Those scenarios range from sunnily optimistic, to middle-of-the-road, to the wildly pessimistic. Guess which one the media and activists fixate on, to the exclusion of all others?
It all depends on what the model assumes about emissions.
“Code red”, extremist scenarios are based explicitly on emissions scenarios that even the IPCC admits are hardly likely.
Last month’s sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pared back warming claims and gave low probability to the outlier “RCP 8.5” scenario which Extinction Rebellion followers claim will cause havoc within a decade.
So why even promote the highly unlikely “RCP 8.5” doom-scenario?
Politics.
The UN climate botherers have been routinely humiliated at their dinky little climate conferences, ever since COP15 at Copenhagen in 2009. That’s when the “climategate” bombshell dropped, brutally exposing the shonks and frauds. Subsequent conferences have been long on private jets, five-star hotels, fatuous celebrities and useless “agreements”, and grossly short on science.
Guterres’ agenda was not about the science but about the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in November.
The UN is desperate to avoid a repeat of the failures of previous COP meetings. Glasgow will probably fail too because the world’s No.1 and 3 emitters, China and India, refuse to lift their Paris 2030 CO2 emissions reduction targets. Emissions will still be rising in 2030.
Instead of admitting that their own climate beanos are a failure, or that their activism is founded on alarmist bullshit, the climate cult instead turns on those who report the inconvenient facts. There’s nothing a fanatic really hates so much as the truth.
It’s not climate science denial but accurate reporting of climate politics that drives activist journalists, the Greens and former prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull nuts […]
The left media’s biggest targets at News Corp, Graham Lloyd and Andrew Bolt, accept man-made climate change but anger the activists because they report inconvenient truths. Think the 2019 peer-reviewed Auckland University study that proves most Pacific atolls are rising rather than sinking. The real deniers are journalists who won’t report such science.
And then there are the problems in energy reliability as the penetration of wind and solar rises. Many journalists on Twitter last month bagged a story in this newspaper which revealed the Energy Security Board would consider paying coal-fired power generators to remain open. This is not denialism. Pretending a nation can have firm grid-scale power without fossil fuels, nuclear power or enormous hydro battery storage is engineering denial.
The Australian
When the climate cult are shouting, “Denier!”, the reality is that they’re just so many particularly witless budgies screeching furiously at their little mirrors.
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